After surveying over 3,000 North Texas residents, UTD has completed its inaugural North Texas Quality of Life Survey. UTD will release a report of survey findings Oct. 30 alongside the launch of the North Texas Quality of Life Initiative website.
EPPS faculty members surveyed residents in five regions across Denon, Collin, Tarrant and Dallas counties — Dallas was split into North and South Dallas. The 90 questions in the survey are split into four different sections which cover life satisfaction, opportunities, civic engagement and pressing topics. The survey also collects secondary data on employment, government performance, education, the environment, mental health, public safety, public health and traffic.
The survey was led by Timothy Bray, director of the Institute for Urban Policy Research at UTD, and political science and methodologies professor Marianne Stewart. Karl Ho, director of graduate studies for the political science program, and assistant political science professor Curtis Bram served as survey advisers.
“We have a sense at UTD that people should [be consulting] UTD when they have questions about the North Texas region instead of going through outside institutions,” Bray said. “We previously didn’t have this kind of data, and now it will be open for students, faculty and public officials to use in their work.”
Bray said the EPPS faculty worked on incorporating an “exit, voice, loyalty” framework into the survey to focus on why people decide to leave an area, express themselves within their community or entrench themselves within a community. Bray said he wanted to bring a new level of depth to the representative information available in North Texas, and that a preliminary analysis of the results already points out key concerns North Texans have.
“Across nearly all demographic lines, people cited inflation and the economy as the biggest issues facing their community today,” Bray said.
EPPS dean Jennifer Holmes said that creating an initiative like this has been her priority since 2018. A $250,000 donation from William Short, CEO of A.E. Perkins Holdings Group, which was later matched by UTD through funds from the Office of the President and the Office of Research and Innovation, got the survey program off the ground in the summer of 2020. Holmes said the initial $500,000 would cover the first three years of the program, and that her next priority would be to maintain funding for the annual quality of life survey and related projects like flash pulse surveys. Bray said that flash pulse surveys can be used to quickly gauge North Texas residents’ opinion on the hot-button issues affecting them, which he said North Texas has “no shortage” of.
“I am pretty optimistic that once people see our data and the quality of our report, we won’t have an issue securing funding since people will want the valuable information we will be able to provide their communities,” Holmes said.
Holmes said that in her previous work studying quality of life surveys in Latin America, she was surprised to see that subunit data wasn’t available. These surveys were structured to represent each city as a whole, but did not reveal details about the city’s subdivisions and neighborhoods, which made analyzing local issues difficult. Holmes and Bray said that, in designing the North Texas Quality of Life Initiative, localization played a major role. As more respondents are recruited, the survey will provide even more specific information than what is currently available for its five subunit regions. Bray said they ensured each subunit yielded useful data through each respondent pool accurately capturing each region’s demographic distribution of race, gender, sex and age, in addition to having at least 500 respondents from each region.
“Oftentimes, the macro data we have — things like unemployment, crime rates and school performance — tends to mask the important variation between neighborhoods and how different people interact with their specific circumstances,” Bray said.
Bray said the Institute of Urban Policy Research has been working on quality of life studies since it was created in 2005, and the annual quality of life survey now provides the opportunity to collect long term data about North Texas communities. Bray said surveying methods had changed dramatically in recent years. Bray and Bram said that of the 25,000 mail-in surveys sent out across the DFW metroplex, only 100 were returned, requiring them to instead use techniques like targeted social media ads and purchasing data from Qualtrics to obtain a representative sample.
“Survey research has gotten more difficult,” Holmes said. “No one answers the phone. Every survey you get, you assume that it is a scam that is trying to steal your data. The combination of our spectacular faculty working on this, the half a million dollars in funding, and current community support created the perfect storm for us to get this project started.”
Bray said the survey received 3,037 complete responses, which exceeded the target of 500 respondents from each region. Going forward, Bray said the team behind the survey wants to develop a survey panel to track individual respondents’ changing perspectives over time. The team is also looking into nontraditional ways to find more respondents, such as through working with local parent-teacher associations or placing survey directions on municipal water bills.
Holmes said the initiative marks an exciting turning point for students and faculty at UTD. Not only will the university be providing a new resource to the North Texas region, but it will also be creating new research and capstone opportunities for students while giving professors a large amount of data to work with.
“For a school like UTD, this project is a major gift to our community, since we are providing representative reliable data to guide the decisions made within our communities,” Holmes said. “This has been my No. 1 priority as dean and it has only taken us six years to get it done.”