Kendal is beginning a “revitalization” process, which will help determine how the campus looks and operates for many years to come. A few days ago, the results of the initial revitalization questionnaire were released. There was a cover letter from Seth Beaver, providing the context of the questionnaire. You can read Seth’s letter here.

As the diagram in the letter shows, the questionnaire is the culmination of the “information gathering” stage of the overall revitalization plan. It also provides some of the background for the “focus groups” stage, which comes next. The letter provides a list of the KCC Revitalization Steering Committee (there are 19 members, including nine residents from the four campuses).

But the key content is the links to 10 different documents which the letter provides. Each document presents a different view of the questionnaire results.

That’s a lot of data in these documents. Where do I start? Like many of you, when I started clicking through those 10 documents, I felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material presented. So this blog post is intended to provide an overview of what the 10 documents contain. It concludes with some suggestions about how to approach them. Later posts will dig more deeply into the details of their content.

Two types of questions; five groups of respondents. The first thing to recognize is that the questionnaire had two kinds of questions, referred to as “closed-ended” and “open-ended”. The closed-ended questions were essentially multiple-choice questions. A typical example would be “Which of the following potential outdoor features are most preferred?” You could choose multiple items such as “Handicapped accessible trails”, “Charging stations for electric cars”, and 8 other options. For questions like that, the answers were tallied and presented as a graph or table (or both).

The open-ended questions required a written response. A typical example would be “What concerns you most about living at Kendal at Longwood?”. For these questions, the newly-released documents provide summaries compiled by Lenhardt Rodgers, our architects. These show the range of answers that people provided, but there is no indication of which areas were more frequently mentioned.

The questionnaire was filled out by five different groups: Kendal residents (240 questionnaires turned in), Crosslands residents (201 questionnaires), staff (drawn from both campuses—68 questionnaires), “interested parties” (80 questionnaires–mostly residents of Conniston and Cartmel, plus a handful of volunteers, donors, and wait-list members) and the KCC Board (8 questionnaires).

The 10 documents. The 10 documents referred to in Seth’s letter are the bulleted items below. And just as in the letter, each document name is a link that you can click to go to the document itself.

The first five documents are simply the results of the closed-ended questions, as tabulated by the survey software. For each question, there is a graph and a table (both showing the same data). These documents are:

The KCC Revitalization Steering Committee took some of the closed-ended responses from the five groups and combined them into charts comparing the answers to close-ended questions given by the five groups. The resulting document is called “2a. Cross Correlated Summary.” As an example of the kind of data it provides, you can see the difference in responses to the question “Which of the following potential outdoor features are most preferred?”. For the KCC Board, “handicapped accessible trails” was the top response. For Kendal residents, the favorite was “More or improved outdoor seating areas”. Crosslands residents’ preferences were evenly split between those two options. Both the staff and the “interested parties” wanted “Larger or additional outdoor gathering or event spaces”. Here is the link to that document:

The final four documents are bullet-point summaries of the questionnaire responses, compiled by Lenhardt Rodgers in presentation format. They provided two of these for each campus: one covering closed-ended questions and one covering open-ended questions.

Note that KCC board, staff, and interested-party responses are tacked onto the end of each of these documents. The identical material appears at the end of both Kendal and Crosslands documents. Here are links to the Lenhardt Rodgers summaries:

Some thoughts on where to start. If you are a Kendal resident who is just beginning to look at this data, my recommendation would be to start with document 3a (“KAL Summary of Closed-Ended Responses”). That will give you a sense of which items were most important to Kendal residents. Next, to get an idea of the responses to the open-ended questions, take a look at document 4a (“KAL Summary of Open-Ended Responses”). Crosslands residents can use the same process, but look at documents 3b and 4b instead.

Then, I would take a look at document 2a (“Cross Correlated Summary”). That will show you the differences between the priorities of Kendal, Crosslands, staff, the KCC board, and the interested parties.

Those three documents will be enough to give you a good sense of the findings. But you might want to dig a bit deeper into the Kendal results by looking through a fourth document, number 1a (“KAL Resident Survey –Closed-Ended Results. That will provide specific numbers for the closed-ended responses. (Document 1b is the equivalent for Crosslands residents.)

Those 3 or 4 documents will provide enough information for most people.

Update: my summaries of the details. In a series of three blog posts (published after this one), I looked at the survey results in detail and highlighted the main findings. Some people may find these posts easier to digest than the raw survey data itself.

Part 1 covered the first 6 of the 13 “closed-ended” survey questions. It can be found at this link.

Part 2 covered the remaining 7 “closed-ended” survey questions. It can be found here.

Part 3 covered the “open-ended survey questions. It can be found here.