Abstract
Survey research is both an art and a science. Once the issues to be addressed by a local Jewish community study are defined, one has to deal with questions of sampling, selecting a survey mechanism, designing a questionnaire, producing reports, and presenting results. This paper deals with various aspects of these four major components of conducting a local Jewish community study. Note that the title of this paper refers to “good practices” and not “best practices.” This is mainly a reflection of the fact that all local Jewish community studies are conducted within an environment of limited financial resources. Best practices would require a much larger budget than Jewish federations can muster for such projects. This paper argues for three things: (1) the importance of using a random digit dialing telephone survey to produce a probability sample that can be used to represent the entire Jewish population and to estimate the size of the Jewish population, (2) the importance, while meeting the specific needs of the community commissioning a given study, of maintaining comparability with other studies, and (3) the need to produce reports that communicate all the results to the community.
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Notes
This includes households, for example, in which the respondent is mentally ill or has hearing issues.
The screener is the introduction to a survey that determines if one is speaking with a Jewish household.
Among other reasons for these increased costs is that while landline exchange codes are tied to different geographies, cell phone exchange codes are not. So, for example, the 954-435 area code-exchange code is Cooper City, Fla., a relatively small area with a high incidence of Jews. When calling landlines via RDD, disproportionate geographically stratified random sampling is possible, lowering costs. Such is not possible when calling cell phones via RDD, since, for example, the 954-558 area code-exchange code combination occurs in all areas of the entirety of Broward County, including areas with few, if any, Jews.
For more information about this data set, see Harriet Hartman and Ira M. Sheskin (2012).
This analysis is slightly flawed by the fact that a small percentage of the growth in Greater Seattle’s Jewish population is outside of King County.
For example, see this video of a town hall presentation on the 2014 Greater Seattle Jewish Community Study: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRayaXqizrk&list=UUoYqzUf3k0FaTRznc8RZD1g.
These large sample sizes have little impact on the overall value of the survey since the interviews completed are not a probability sample of the entire population. It would be far better to have four hundred surveys completed by telephone using RDD/list/DJN than to have four thousand completed on the Internet.
An Internet survey was completed recently in Northern New Jersey, but the study area is different (due to the merger of two federations) than that used for the 2001 Jewish Community Study of Bergen County and North Hudson.
In the 2013 Pew Research Center survey, interviews lasted an average of 25 minutes and the median survey interview length for the National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01 was 43 minutes.
Close-ended questions are questions for which respondents select from among answers that have been read to them. Open-ended questions are questions for which respondents must provide their own responses. Many open-ended questions begin with “why.”
This is based upon my asking the members of every demographic study committee with whom I have worked for estimates of the percentage of Jewish children living in single-parent families.
The communities were in Atlanta, Denver-Boulder, Las Vegas, West Palm Beach, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, South Palm Beach, and Washington, D.C.
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Sheskin, I.M. Good Practices in Local Jewish Community Studies. Cont Jewry 36, 319–341 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-016-9184-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-016-9184-3