Public Participation
Citizen Surveys by Local Governments in North Carolina
Citizen surveys allow local governments to gauge satisfaction with city/county services or learn about concerns by the community at large. Surveys can be general and broad or focused on a particular service, issue or project.
These two resources can help officials looking for general background on how to do a survey:
- Berner, Maureen, Ashley Bowers, and Laura Heyman. "So you want to do a survey . . ." Popular Government 67, no. 4 (2002): 23-32.
- What is a Survey?, from the American Statistical Association: free, online booklet explaining mail and telephone surveys and focus groups.
Surveys take many different forms. We have gathered a wide variety of examples of surveys and related questionnaires from local governments across North Carolina.
Thank you to the jurisdictions who have provided these surveys and reports to share! If you have updated or new/different examples that could help others, please consider submitting them to our database. Send documents to Max Kadel at mkadel@sog.unc.edu or Maureen Berner at mberner@sog.unc.edu. If you have other types of documents that would be willing to share around citizen engagement efforts, please send to stephens@sog.unc.edu.
Most of the surveys on the pages linked below are for general citizen input about services, or general satisfaction with town policies and operations. For locales that have submitted more specialized surveys, such as ones regarding litter or animal adoption, those links will appear after the more general surveys (see Town of Cary, Town of Columbus, City of Newton, Village of Pinehurst, Town of Pink Hill, Haywood County, and Wake County).
- For questions on the best kind of survey for your particular need, please contact Maureen Berner at mberner@sog.unc.edu.
- For advice on citizen participation projects, contact John Stephens stephens@sog.unc.edu and make sure to visit our citizen engagement micro-site.
(Updated June 2017 by Max Kadel)
City of Asheville