We are dealing with the challenge of surveying commuters on a college campus. Our approach is going to be to "force" students to respond when they register for spring classes starting around October. This would have respondents answering about their commute over different weeks. For example, grad students get priority registration starting on October 1st and answer the survey. On October 7th, seniors or those with enough credits register and answer the survey, on October 14th juniors register and respond, etc.
My question is whether all responders have to assess their travel over the SAME week or if as long as they are responding about their commute over the previous 5 weekdays with no holidays and within the same season we are ok? Thanks!
Dan Ackerstein
PrincipalAckerstein Sustainability, LLC
LEEDuser Expert
819 thumbs up
March 2, 2012 - 8:42 pm
Hi Emily - I think you're fine. As long as the 2 5-day spans are both seasonally appropriate and don't include holidays, I would very much expect GBCI to prioritize the soundness of your approach to getting a high response rate over the accommodation required for the two populations to be surveyed during two different weeks. Seems like a home-run to me, and a great way to get responses.
Hope that helps,
Dan
Bina Indelicato
Founding Parntereco evolutions
6 thumbs up
November 7, 2013 - 8:20 am
Dan and Emily,
While I absolutely agree with this approach we have received push back from our GBCI review team for 3 buildings that we recently submitted. Due to the campus' low survey response rate (~20% after the first week), we extended the availability of the survey over a few weeks in order to have more occupants respond to the survey (available online). This in no way skewed the results, but was needed in order to reach the 30% threshold for using the 0.4 Extrapolation factor. We had all of 3 buildings get this credit denied because of this issue (dropping the certification level for 2 of the buildings). We are in the process now of submitting an appeal.
Dan Ackerstein
PrincipalAckerstein Sustainability, LLC
LEEDuser Expert
819 thumbs up
November 8, 2013 - 2:28 pm
Hey Brian,
That's very interesting feedback and actually what I would expect. I think GBCI would be sympathetic to Emily's strategy because it is by design, rather than reactive. GBCI really doesn't want these surveys stretching out into perpetuity, as folks memories for commute patterns are notoriously unreliable and sampling over longer period creates all kinds of subtle challenges. But Emily's approach feels different to me, in that it anticipates a way of maximizing response rates using an existing, highly-subscribed vehicle. I may be off-base here and GBCI wouldn't agree with my take (which admittedly, violates the letter of the law), but if I was the reviewer for her project, I'd think it made a lot of sense. (And I'd feel bummed about denying yours, because I suspect that any impact on the results was indeed pretty marginal, even if the methodology wasn't quite right.)
Dan