Course Content
Draw a circle around WHERE
What areas, exactly, are part of your community? What are its geographic limits and boundaries? When deciding what area to survey, think about how you want to use the data. For example, if your intent is to capture disparities between urban and rural youth, you are going to need to survey both areas in sufficient numbers to make such a comparison possible. The project’s research/data partner should be able to tell you what those minimum numbers are.
Depending on how the survey is administered, it can be useful to think about the geographic area in terms of postal codes. Even if your survey invitations do not go out in the mail, many kinds of data, including from Statistics Canada and many municipalities, are organized by postal code. Following the same survey parameters can make it easier for you to compare the data you collect to other relevant studies. It is unlikely that you will be able to reach conclusions based on information gathered elsewhere – the standard to directly compare data requires multiple variables to align, including demographics, geography and the precise language used for questions – but reviewing the data that is available can still provide useful insights into contextual factors and significant disparities and trends over time.
If you have the survey administered through schools, the boundaries will encompass their catchment areas. You can still reference other data based on postal codes, but the comparisons will be less exact. We encourage communities to plan to reach young people outside of schools as well, and this is often the core engagement strategy.
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