2009 Edmonton Citizen Satisfaction Survey Results

The results of the 2009 Citizen Satisfaction Survey are being presented to City Council today. The survey was once again conducted by Banister Research & Consulting Inc. Some quick facts:

• The total cost of the survey was $13,650.
• A total of 800 telephone interviews with Edmonton residents aged 18 or older were completed between June 2 and June 14, 2009.
• A total of 7989 calls were attempted, 2328 of which resulted in refusals.
• 50% of respondents were male, 50% were female.
• 79% of respondents have lived in Edmonton for more than 10 years.
• 69% of respondents were aged 45 or older.
• 76% of respondents reported average household income of less than $150,000
• City-wide results provide a margin of error no greater than +/- 3.5% at the 95% confidence level, 19 times out of 20.

There’s lots of great information in the report, which you can download in PDF here. Or if you prefer, you can just download the highlights, also in PDF.

One of the survey questions is the following:

Now, taking into consideration all City of Edmonton services and programs, overall, how satisfied are you with the services and programs provided by the City of Edmonton to residents?

And here are the results:

In the report, Banister explains:

It is important to note that in 2007, 2008 and 2009 this overall satisfaction question was asked following the satisfaction ratings for specific City services. This was done in order to allow respondents to think of all facets of the service provided by the City of Edmonton, thereby providing a cumulative and overall rating.

I thought it would be interesting to check how effective that is. Unfortunately, the results of the survey are in PDF, not the easiest format to work with. Fortunately for you, that didn’t stop me!

Download the Satisfaction Results by Area in XLS

(I recognize that Excel isn’t the ideal open format, but it was quicker than creating 18 different CSV files. And hopefully this data will be made available as part of the open data initiative anyway.)

Citizens were asked how satisfied they were with 18 different service areas (one, environmental programs, was new this year so I ignored it). The data is available for each area for 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2003. I added up the “very satisfied” and “somewhat satisfied” percentages for each and compared it with previous years. Here is the percentage change in satisfaction for each area from last year:

And here is the percentage change in satisfaction for each area from 2003 (affordable housing was not scored in 2003):

Now we can compare the reported and actual change:

Respondents reported a 1% decrease in overall satisfaction from 2008, and the average change of all the services was the same. Compared with 2003 however, respondents reported a 13% decrease in overall satisfaction, but the average change of all services was a decrease of just 5%.

See how much fun you can have with open data? Now imagine combining this dataset with other datasets! I’d love to compare the results of the satisfaction survey with 311 call volumes, for instance.