Refining a Needs Assessment
Whether you are beginning a needs assessment from scratch, or refining and updating an existing assessment, it is important to keep in mind your main goal to develop of a comprehensive service plan and coordinated strategy that engages citizens and established community partners to positively impact the areas of greatest local need. This goal should help focus the refining process.
This section assumes that you are working from an established set of needs for the community. The information may have come from a previously conducted community needs assessment, research from various public agencies or research institutions, census data, or some combination of these and other sources.
Why Refine?
You want to ensure that the needs data that you have available is:
- Current
- How old is the information that you are using? If it is more than three years old, it is time for an update.
- Situations in cities can change rapidly. As a result of the economic crisis, many communities are facing record unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, and hunger issues that may not have been present just three years ago. The transient nature of people seeking employment may also mean that the demographics of the community have changed.
- Relevant
- Is the information you have still significant to the current status of your community? For example, prior to and during the Salt Lake City Olympics, people were displaced from their homes to make room for the many visitors who were willing to pay premium prices for lodging. Homelessness became a major issue for the city. An assessment done during this period may not be relevant to the current status of the city.
- Inclusive
- Who participated in the research or assessment in which your data was gathered? Data gathered for a specific purpose or neighborhood may not accurately represent the entire community. If the data is not inclusive of the issues, neighborhoods, and constituent groups, additional data should be gathered.
- Groups often conduct research around specific issues that the group has a vested interest in, such as an education foundation researching that issue or the health department conducting research on its priority issue. Nonprofits that work in particular parts of the community probably have conducted research in a geographic area it serves. You will also want to note if the data included the needs of traditionally underserved groups in your community.
If the data you have is not current, relevant nor inclusive, it’s time to update and refine your assessment. The five Ws will help you to make this determination.
Who
- Who conducted the assessment? Were they part of a special interest group seeking data on a limited set of issues?
- Who participated in the assessment? Did it include a wide enough segment of stakeholders? Did it include underrepresented groups, and if so, did they have enough representation to be heard?
What
- What issues were covered in the assessment?
- What mechanisms were used? For example, assessments done solely online limit participation.
When
- When was the assessment conducted? Was it done during the past three years? Has anything changed significantly since the assessment?
- For meetings/focus groups: At what time of day were they conducted? Were there various times to accommodate people who don’t work traditional hours?
Where
- Was the assessment limited to a particular geographic location within the community?
- For meetings/focus groups: Did they take place in various locations (including physical spaces) that were accessible to a broad cross section of the community?
Doing the Refinement
The way that you will refine the needs assessment depends on the information you currently have available and the methods you are planning to use to collect additional data. The methods used for refining the data are the same as those you use in conducting an initial needs assessment:
- focus groups
- community forums
- interviews and surveys
- action research
For more information on these methods, see Starting a Needs Assessment.
When refining data, you will again explore the Five Ws.
Who should be involved?
- A broad segment of stakeholders including:
- public agencies
- community intermediaries
- underrepresented groups
What issues and questions will be part of the assessment?
- Data on the priority needs found in previous assessment data
- Data related to the priority needs
- Questions that will test the relevancy of existing data
- Questions that will seek current information about existing data
- Questions that will seek new information about community needs
What mechanisms will be used to conduct the assessment?
- Mechanisms should include written and verbal forms of assessment.
- Consider in-person, online, and telephone methods.
- Ensure that assessment tools, including online tools, meet ADA standards for accessibility.
- Provide tools in languages other than English that are represented in your community.
When will the assessment take place?
- For maximum feedback, provide a large amount of time for feedback.
- If mailing surveys, do not have them overlap with census mailings because this may create confusion.
- If using meetings or focus groups, hold them at various times to ensure people with different schedules can attend.
Where will the assessment take place?
- Explore partnerships with libraries to promote completing online or paper surveys while visiting a branch.
- Develop relationships with faith-based, community-based, and neighborhood organizations, and have them distribute paper surveys or promote the online tool.
- Ensure that any in-person meetings happen at various locations around the community so that they are accessible to all and in locations where groups feel comfortable. Schools, faith- and community-based organizations, and neighborhood groups may also host live meetings or focus groups for their constituents.
Why are you doing an assessment and how will it be used?
- People will take the time to complete a survey or participate in a focus group if they believe that the information they provide will be used.
- Your marketing and outreach should include the purpose of the assessment, how it will be used, and the outcomes you hope to achieve.
Types of Survey Questions and Sample Questions
Open-ended
Designed to prompt the respondent to provide you with more than just one- or two-word responses. These are often “how” or “why” questions.
- Example: “How can we make improvements on the issues you think are priorities in our city?” These questions are used when you want to find out about respondents’ attitudes about issues, or how much they know about a given topic. Open-ended questions provide good anecdotal evidence. However, the drawback of using open-ended questions is that it’s time-consuming to compile the results. If you’re distributing large numbers of surveys, you should strictly limit open-ended questions.
Closed-ended (also sometimes referred to as forced-choice questions)
Specific questions that prompt “yes” or “no” answers.
- Example: “Do you think volunteers can help to address the priority needs of our city?” These are used when the information you need is fairly clear-cut, i.e., you want to know whether people use a particular service or have ever heard of a specific local resource.
Multiple choice
Lets the respondent select one answer from a few possible choices.
Example: “The most effective way to utilize volunteers to improve our city is as…”
- Tutors and mentors in schools and after-school programs
- Neighborhood watch participants
- Cleaning up our streets and parks
- Refurbishing abandoned buildings to create low-income housing
- Visiting seniors in their homes and taking them to doctors’ appointments and on errands
These allow you to get more detailed information than closed-ended questions, and the results can be compiled more easily than open-ended questions.
Likert scale
Each respondent is asked to rate items on a response scale.
Example: Please rate each of the following items on a scale of 1 to 5 when you:
1 = strongly disagree
2 = disagree
3 = undecided
4 = agree
5 = strongly agree
| Public safety could be improved by: | Strongly Disagree |
Disagree | Undecided | Agree | Strongly Agree |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adding street lights | 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
| Installing surveillance cameras | 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
| Increasing police patrols | 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
| Starting a crime-stopper hotline | 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
| Starting/expanding neighborhood watch | 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
A Likert scale can help identify how strongly people think or feel about an issue. The question above seeks to find out what people think. An alternative or additional question might be, “I would feel safer if my neighborhood had more…” This question strives to identify how people feel. Understanding both the thoughts and feelings of constituents can help elicit appropriate responses.
Click here for a sample needs assessment survey.
Source:
University of Kansas’s online Community Tool Box, Chapter 3, Assessing Community Needs and Resources.
Sample Focus Group Questions
- What are some of your thoughts about public safety in the community?
- Would you say you feel safe in your community?
- If yes, why is that? Or what makes you feel safe?
- What’s going well?
- If no, what would make you feel safe or safer?
- What’s not going well?
- Are there things that you would like to see changed?
- If yes, what changes would you like to see? Why is that?
- How should they change? Or how do you think these changes will improve safety?
- Some people have said that some ways to improve public safety are:
- more street lights
- install surveillance cameras
- increase police presence
- activate a crime-stopper hotline
- Start or expand neighborhood watches
- For each suggestion, ask participants, “Do you agree with this?” or “How do you feel about that?"
- Are there other recommendations that you have, or suggestions you would like to make?
- Are there other things you would like to say before we wind up?
- Some probes, or follow-ups, designed to get more information on a given question are:
- Can you say more about that?
- Can you give an example?
- Jane says X. What do others think?
- How about you, Joe? Or, does anyone in that corner of the room have some thoughts on this?
- Does anyone else have some thoughts on that?
