Thank you to everyone who completed my recent survey. It was opened for comment on 13 April 2014 and there were 53 responses between that date and 1 May. It will take more than one page to do justice to the many thoughtful and interesting responses. This page is a kind of intro: information about who answered the survey and the reasons people gave for visiting this website. The graphs can be enlarged.
The majority (65.38%) of responses came from people resident in York (within City of York council boundaries, includes some villages outside of York).
25% were former residents (many of the people on my mailing list are former residents).
The remaining 9.62% were people who regularly visit the city.
Most of the people who completed the survey were in the over 30 age group. Only 3.77% were under 30.
The highest percentage (26.42%) were in my own (40-49) age group, closely followed by 24.53% in the 50-59 age range and also 24.53% in the ’60 or older’. (I didn’t particularly like that rather broad category but it was one of the standard formats the survey offered.) 20.75% of respondents were in the 30-39 age group.
I’m not going to attempt analysis of this, just want to say that of course there are people in the under-20 age group visiting the site (the graph above shows none) but perhaps they’re less likely to fill in online surveys.
Responses to: ‘why do you visit this website’. I wish I’d offered more options/suggestions for this (including perhaps ‘to see things you’ve found in your understairs cupboard ephemera archive’, as I seem to be including that kind of thing a fair bit recently.)
90.20% of respondents visit for information on changes in York – not surprising, as the subtitle of this website is ‘York and its changes from a resident’s perspective’.
What did surprise me, and I find it very interesting, is that the next most popular reason for visiting was to read ‘opinion on local controversies (eg King’s Square, Lendal Bridge)': 70.59%
There was an ‘other’ option on this question too, but it can’t be turned into a graph as it was a text box for comment. Some of the comments from this and a later similar question on the survey are on a separate page, where I collected them together as they were so good to read and made the ten years of online work seem worthwhile. Thank you. I appreciated your considered thoughts and your kind words.
Publicising the survey
The first two responses were from people who had seen the survey posted on the website before it was mentioned anywhere else. I then advertised its existence on Twitter, and this brought more responses fairly rapidly. A newsletter mailing to my mailing list resulted in many more.
I mentioned it on Twitter several times after that. It wasn’t advertised on Facebook – at least I didn’t advertise it there as I don’t use Facebook. Two people whose views I was interested in I contacted individually, one responded.
The number of responses stuck at 49 for a while, so I mentioned it again on Twitter in the hope of getting to a nice round 50, and in the end had 53.
Names and anonymity
The response to the ‘Name’ box was interesting. I didn’t make it compulsory, because I know that ‘anon’ can often speak the truth and that being ‘anon’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Though it was noticeable that the majority of responses did include a full name.
38 of the 53 responses included a full name, or Twitter name, or online identity I’d recognise (eg distinctive first name which was recognisable to me from comments on the site/email/Twitter correspondence). Of the other respondents, the ‘anons': 8 left a first name, 1 respondent included a first name and place (‘from Poland’), 1 left initials, 1 apologised and said he/she never gave a name on online surveys, and 4 people left the box blank.
. . . . .
So, that’s the context and some info on who responded. What did people say?
There were definite trends/repeated concerns, and some interesting observations. More soon.
Sorry Lisa, forgot to do your survey – will do next time! Be interesting to see the results.
Hi Jonathan – the survey is still open, you can find it on that link above in the first paragraph. I’ll probably leave it open for a while so any time you want to add your thoughts you’re very welcome. (But will have to base my ‘analysis’ (such as it is) on the 53, now I’ve added the above.)