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Designing a Survey, By Stella Sappington

This August 2017 I am interning with the IRC to complete a project around food security and food preferences for the resettled refugee clients of the IRC. I will be designing a survey based on background reading in order to assess the primarily Afghani community of recent migrants. These surveys hope to address the potential location and offerings of a farm stand which would sell fresh produce and cater to the community. I will survey over the phone and collect responses which will lead me to make a results summary and recommendations going forward.

Following months of thought and preparation, I am elated to experience this project come into being. The most surprising aspect of the experience, is, without a doubt, its seeming simplicity despite my previous conceptions that it would be much more complicated. In fact, its arc and development seems to hang, easily suspended before my eyes. It is so clear. I look forward to watching it unfold.

Only a week into the process I have read over background studies and previous successfully developed surveys. These resources have become the foundation for the survey I am developing with my project manager, Thomas Stein. At this time I have sent him my first draft and await his notes. We hope to invest time in the complete and thoughtful creation of the survey, making our data collection truly representative. The survey will walk the line between questioning food security and looking for specific food items that would be worth selling at the farmstand. The survey is much like market research in that it questions potential consumers. However, it also hopes to get to know the needs of the community.

Questions that abound in my mind all direct toward the survey’s purpose. Will it successfully prod at the question of the location of a farm stand? Will the survey ensure that the farm stand provides to consumers what it is they want and need? And, ultimately, will the fulfillment of these wants and needs also answer questions of resettlement, belonging and security? Always at the forefront of my mind are the readings I’ve done on the very real impact that food security and resettlement has on the mental health of migrants, refugees and asylees. I also take lessons learned from previous research done with the IRC which motivates me to find out if the surveyed is the primary grocery shopper, to ask clear questions, to stimulate discussion, to think of ways to build community around food, to concern myself with brevity, to avoid short and long answer format questions and to avoid complicated scaling.

To ensure that the clients of this program and their lived experiences drive this project, I hope to travel soon to Sacramento to visit the New Roots farm and community garden plots. Here I hope to meet clients who work in their time off from their jobs and families.

Sources: Questions, formatting and changes for the future from previous IRC projects were completed by: Sara Riegler, Julia Jordan, Ai-Lin Chen, Bilkis Bharucha and Natasha Pavlovich
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