SWAG agenda 052015 - Laserfiche WebLink

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5 The Odum Institute responded to the suggestion of conducting another convenience center survey at this time as follows: 1. The January 2015 SWCC survey provided an accurate and reliable snapshot of SWCC usage by residents who live within and outside town limits. It is not clear to us the purpose of collecting additional data on this some matter. While overall SWCC usage rates do fluctuate with weather and other seasonal changes, such fluctuations would change the survey conclusions only if they affect the behavior of residents within town limits differently than those outside town limits. Weather affects everybody. Vacations and holidays affect everybody. Before spending resources on another SWCC user survey, we urge the SWAG to consider what parameters, if any, can reasonably be expected to affect in -town and out -of -town residents differentially. 2. Some may feel that "more data is always better data." If data were free and obtainable without involvement of the humans under study, this might be true. But neither is true here. The sampling ratio needed to get good survey estimates of the SWCC in a reasonable length data collection period is one in five; one of every five users entering the SWCC is surveyed. ;, a sampling ratio of 1 in 5 means that a large number of users will be sampled for survey more than once, and some more than twice. The "annoyance" factor of this situation is significant and the result is refusals (known as "nonresponse. ") Nonresponse introduces "noise" in the data and reduces the trustworthiness of survey estimates. In the January 2015 survey, field staff encountered a total of 16 refusals (about 1 %). This reflects a good cooperation rate and the "noise" from the substitutions is likely having no effect on the survey estimates. But the more surveys that are conducted, and the more frequently, the less tolerant the public will be, and the higher the refusal rate. Data from additional surveys are not necessarily better data if they contain more noise. 3. If an additional survey were conducted, it would not be appropriate to combine the two surveys into a single estimate. They would be two individual snapshots in time, and if they differ, the SWAG would need to decide how they would be used as such for policy and decision making purposes. 4. With an unlimited budget, one could consider a continuous data collection design in which SWCC users are sampled and surveyed across all operating hours of all SWCCs across the entire calendar year, with a sampling ratio much lower than 1 in 5. This would account for all seasonal variations and minimize nonresponse, but it would be extremely costly and would require a complete calendar year of data collection to generate results. 5. We understand that Orange County plans to close the Eubanks Convenience Center for upgrades beginning in August 2015 and will not re -open it until May of 2016, and that a temporary replacement site will provided only for collection of bagged household waste Since this interruption of normal operations could result in temporary changes in user behavior (e.g. users may go to other SWCCs or even to out -of- county locations), we caution the SWAG about making conclusions about long -term behavior from any data collected during this period —if any are collected.