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NEEDS
ASSESSMENT
What are the steps in conducting a needs assessment study?
- Establish a working committee to solicit individual
and community involvement and develop a plan of action.
- List important issues to be addressed.
- Identify the population to be surveyed.
- Determine the information that is needed -- it may
be existing information which must be collected, or it may be information
gathered using a survey.
- Select a random sample of persons to survey.
- Develop and pretest a questionnaire.
- Collect information.
- Analyze the data.
- Report the results.
Who Will Conduct the Study?
The first step in performing a needs assessment is to decide who will
conduct the study. A needs assessment study can be carried out by outside
consultants, volunteers, or staff. Your available resources, time frame,
and comfort level with performing research may influence your decision.
There are advantages and disadvantages that must be evaluated and these
are reviewed in this section.
Outside consultants have expertise in how to
conduct research studies. They provide objectivity in the needs assessment
process by offering an outsider's view. Since consultants are experienced
at performing research, this option makes better use of your limited time.
The primary disadvantage to using outside consultants is the cost. Consultants
are your most expensive option.
Volunteers from the community are another
possibility. Volunteers provide several advantages: they don't cost anything
(or very little if you offer them a small stipend for their time) and
they save staff time. One of the disadvantages in using volunteers to
help with needs assessments is that they may present a biased interpretation
of what the community needs; thus, it is important to select volunteers
who reflect a broad array of the community. In addition, it may be difficult
to find volunteers who are willing to devote their time to this process
and who have experience in performing research.
Staff can also perform needs assessments. While staff are less expensive
than hiring outside consultants, many staff are inexperienced in research
methods and do not have the time to perform a needs assessment on top
of their regular responsibilities. If the needs assessment becomes an
in-house activity, it is important to offer adequate compensation in terms
of reducing the staff member's other work responsibilities.
You need to weigh the pros and cons for each method and decide what will
be the most effective approach. Often, budget is the major factor restricting
the choices. It may be a good idea to use a combination of these methods.
For example, you might hire an outside consultant to help you set up the
needs assessment study, but then use volunteers to actually implement
the study. Dividing the responsibilities in creative ways might help in
performing a cost-effective needs assessment.
What Kind of Information Will Be Collected?
The second step in performing a needs assessment is to decide what you
hope to learn about your community and what kind of information you plan
to collect. For example, do you hope to perform a broad-based study or
one that is focused on a particular area? Some of the categories of information
you might be interested in collecting include:
- Historical Development:
To help you understand how the community became what it is today and
to provide insight into the kinds of resources to collect and weed;
- Geographical and Transportation Information:
To help you understand your community's growth patterns and population
distribution;
- Political and Legal Factions:
To help you decide strategies for community-based selection;
- Demographic Data (e.g., age characteristics,
size, race, and transience of the population): To help
you recognize the demographics of your community and identify population
distribution changes;
- Economic Data: To help
you identify your community's economic base;
- Social, Cultural, Educational
and Recreational Organizations: To help you determine
your community's values and social patterns.
How Will the Information Be Collected?
Now that you have decided on the types of information you want to collect
about your community, you need to determine how to collect that information.
You can collect data by interviewing key informants in the community,
holding a community forum, researching social indicators/demographic information
from public records and reports, and performing field surveys. It is best
if you can use more than one of these data collection methods in combination.
However, most centers don't have the necessary budgetary and staff resources
to use more than one method. These data collection methods are discussed
further below.
Key Informants
Key informants of the community are people who hold socially responsible
positions (such as educators, public officials, clergy and business representatives),
or are active in community events. Key informants, by virtue of their
positions in the community, have wide contact with people in the community;
typically community members turn to key informants for help in answering
their questions. By interviewing key informants, you can get a better
understanding of their impressions of the needs of the community. However,
this method provides subjective data since it is based on opinions that
may not reflect the needs of the entire community.
Community Forum
Another data collection option is to hold a community forum. A community
forum involves holding a group event that may include the entire community.
It is a good idea to include as many as possible of the people who use
(or potentially could use) your center to help decide what services should
be available. Community forums can give visibility to your center and
raise its status within the community. However, these forums require lots
of planning and publicity. The majority of the attendees will probably
be active community members, rather than those who do are not active at
all. This can make it difficult to determine how to encourage non-active
members of the community to use the center, which is one of the reasons
you are probably doing the needs assessment in the first place. Another
disadvantage of this method is that it tends to provide subjective and
impressionistic data about the community's needs.
Public Records
A more objective method of data collection is to use public records (such
as the national Census) to find out the social indicators or demographics
of your community related to age, gender, education level, income level,
etc.
Surveys
Surveys and questionnaires involve asking individuals in
the community about their needs. Surveys can be implemented in several
ways:
- Mailing questionnaires to randomly selected members
of the community (or in small communities, to all households)
- Performing telephone surveys
- Handing out surveys while people are at a community
event
- Posting questionnaires on your website.
Response rates vary depending on the method used. For example, mailed
surveys tend to have the lowest response rates while surveys performed
over the telephone tend to have higher participation rates. While mailed
surveys are the most expensive option and get low response rates, the
mailed survey method requires very little time to implement and is easy
to coordinate. It is standard practice to provide confidentiality to your
survey participants; reassuring your participants that their survey responses
will be kept confidential might help improve your response rates, especially
in a small community.
Information gathered from surveys is only as good as the questions that
are asked; thus, the phrasing of survey questions is a very important
consideration and can have a tremendous impact on the results you get.
In addition to the way the question is phrased, survey questions can be
formatted in several ways: as open ended questions that require the participant
to write in a response, as fixed alternative questions that ask participants
to select one of the presented options, or as closed questions that require
participants to answer yes or no. Each of these formats has advantages
and disadvantages; how you phrase and format these questions must be carefully
considered. It is always a good idea to pretest your questions to help
identify flaws in the question format. You might also want to solicit
help from an experienced survey researcher at this stage, if you are performing
the needs assessment yourself.
How Will the Information Be Used?
In order to make use of the information you have collected, the results
have to be interpreted. To interpret the data, some statistical analyses
are often applied to identify what the majority of the community feels
are the most important needs. When the data analysis is complete, it should
be possible to produce a rank-ordered list of the most important changes
identified by the community; this ranking can be used to set budget priorities.
At the end of this process, it is a good idea to share your findings with
the community in some way: holding a group meeting, creating displays
at the library, or writing articles to appear online.
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