Survey: what do you love about SOMA? what needs to be improved?

imonlysleeping said:
But what do you intend to do with this info? I still don't understand. Comments in open fields are just anecdotal and don't provide any actual data. If this were some kind of customer-service thing then you'd want the anecdotal comments, but if the goal is some kind of meaningful overview then only the comparable data would be of interest. Also, you don't have enough variables to make for any kind of analysis beyond, as you say, comparing the two towns. I'm just not grasping what the goal/point is, even just as a fun personal project. What are you hoping to learn?

All reasonable questions. The impetus for this survey was my own experience moving to the suburbs and finding that that it was hard to get really useful information about the various suburban towns around NYC. Sure, there's census data, but I find that it's unwieldy and doesn't give a particularly good feel for what it's like to actually live somewhere. I'm trying to see if there's a way (aside from census data) to gather info about a community that provides both a qualitative, personal assessment of a given town, as well as some quantitative basis for comparing attitudes in one town vs. another. I realize this doesn't exactly qualify as scientific, but I thought it could still be interesting and useful.

Anyway, I realize I may be doing a poor job describing what I have in mind, but I'll try to put something together after this survey runs and share it on here. And thanks for the feedback and questions - it definitely helps me to clarify my thinking.

For example, I just grabbed all the open field data for the "things you love" question and put it into a wordcloud generator. Granted, it's not scientific, but still fun and I think gives a nice sense of what Maplewood is all about.