Newtown Survey Results To Be Presented January 8

By John Voket

Eleven months after he was inspired to conduct a formal poll tracking residents’ opinions, needs, wants, and concerns, Newtowner Paul Lundquist is ready to unveil a raft of results. On Tuesday, January 8, at 7 pm, at the Edmond Town Hall’s Alexandria Room, the professional pollster will hold a formal presentation of results from his Newtown Survey.

Mr Lundquist, a principal at the Harrison Group, a nationally known research and consulting firm, personally tracked and balanced the thousands of responses from more than 850 completed questionnaires, producing the final stats for this comprehensive public opinion and strategic research study.

Mr Lundquist said in a release, that from a pure research perspective, the first of its kind independent study has already been a great success.

“We had 852 households participate in the study, and these households represented an excellent cross section of the town, reflecting its true demographic proportions.”

Validating the demographic accuracy of his results, Mr Lundquist discovered nearly perfect age alignment of those who took the survey versus actual town demographics from the latest US census. To ensure an even more accurate representation, though, final data was weighted and balanced through statistical methods to reflect known population statistics such as age, gender, income, employment, whether there are children in the household attending Newtown public schools, and even relationships like whether respondents voted for or against last year’s town budget.

“The methodology is consistent with good survey research,” Mr Lundquist said, adding that all of these initial steps were critical to ensure the integrity of the study’s results. The study has a sampling error of plus/minus three percent at the 90 percent confidence interval.

“This is the statistical mumbo jumbo that people hear all the time associated with public polling — especially now with the national election primary season in full swing,” Mr Lundquist told The Bee this week.

He said there is less than a one-in-ten chance the results of a survey this size would differ by more than three percentage points in either direction from the results obtained if all of the households in Newtown had completed the survey. To best ensure the quality of the data presented, Mr Lundquist weighed the survey results against sample data from such reliable sources as the Newtown School District, the US Census Bureau, and demographic reports from the Connecticut Economic Resource Center.

“These results are pretty bulletproof,” Mr Lundquist said. “This is as good as it gets in survey research, and I’m very happy with the level of participation we had.”

While the survey was conducted in October 2007, Mr Lundquist committed to holding the results until after town elections were completed. He said the busy holiday season was also not an appropriate time to release the survey data.

“I’ve been trying to gauge the best time when regular folks could carve out an hour or two to attend a presentation if they were so inclined, and early January seemed to be the earliest date that most people could make that happen,” he said.

In February of 2007, after listening to a lot of people speaking at a Legislative Council meeting, Mr Lundquist offered to do a study at no expense to the town, to better understand if the public sentiment expressed at the meeting ran deeper into the community.

“I thought that would be a pretty important thing to understand, among many other issues,” he said.

As the survey was developed, it came to include a host of issues important to residents of Newtown, such as the Master Plan for Fairfield Hills, the potential creation of a new town hall, commercial development at both Fairfield Hills and the town in general, opinions about the town budget, attitudes toward Newtown’s public education system, support for high school expansion plans, Lyme disease, and many other topics. (See related story.)

“All of these subjects will be covered in the public presentation on January 8,” he said.

Immediately following the public presentation, Mr Lundquist said he is planning to meet with various town officials, “to make sure this information gets into the hands of people who benefit from it and put it to the best use possible.”

Mr Lundquist has offered to release a copy of his presentation to the Board of Selectmen to discuss at the board’s scheduled meeting Monday, January 7.

Following this initial presentation, Mr Lundquist will also begin releasing findings on specific topics exclusively through an arrangement with The Bee, and he hopes to also have an electronic copy posted online, possibly linked through the town website.