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Politics & Government

Column: In Voices to Vision, Who Speaks for Albany?

In claiming to speak for the community, Voices to Vision crosses a line, says one local researcher. The study sample is "conspicuously unrepresentative" of the city's population, he wrote in a column he shared with Albany Patch.

The Fern Tiger report, Voices to Vision, has been useful for Albany in many respects: It has broadened public discussion and engagement about the future of the waterfront and helped lower the temperature of the debate that erupted several years ago over the proposed Caruso development at that site.

In another respect, however, the report has been much less useful: While claiming to reflect Albany public opinion, Voices to Vision is in fact based on a skewed and unrepresentative sample of the city’s population. As a result, its claim to represent the will of the community is unwarranted, and few researchers would accept its findings at face value.

As a research sociologist at UC, Berkeley, I have occasion to review many studies submitted for publication in social-science journals. And as an Albany resident, I became curious about the Voices to Vision study after seeing it cited so often in our local media (I did not participate in any of the community sessions organized by Fern Tiger Associates).

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Originally published in the spring of last year, the report has enjoyed renewed attention now that the site is one of the finalists that Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory is considering for a second campus. One of the report’s findings, in particular, has drawn much attention: That the majority of Albany’s citizens want 75 percent of the site to be maintained as open space.     

Yet the Voices to Vision study was not designed in a manner that would permit any conclusions of this kind.

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The standard method for conducting public-opinion surveys is to select a random sample of the target population. Selecting participants randomly ensures that the study sample includes a representative cross-section of the community and thereby allows the researcher to extrapolate survey findings from the sample to the larger community.

This method also enables the researcher to estimate error bands or “confidence intervals” around specific survey findings. The Gallup and California Field polls, for example, routinely qualify their findings by reporting a range, plus or minus a given number of percentage points, by which the survey sample may differ from the population. The absence of confidence intervals in the Voices to Vision report is a red flag that insufficient care may have been taken in generalizing from the study sample to the larger Albany community.

In place of a random sample, the Voices to Vision sample was “self-selected,” in survey-research parlance. That is, the sample was selected not by the researchers, based on a random-sampling design, but by the participants themselves – those who decided to attend the community sessions. Self-selected samples of this kind are notorious for attracting disproportionate numbers of activists and others with strong views, pro or con, on a given issue, with the result that the study sample tends to become unrepresentative of the larger population. This is precisely what occurred in the case of Voices to Vision.

To illustrate the highly skewed nature of the Voices to Vision sample, the table below compares the demographic profile of study participants with the most recent available U.S. Census data for Albany (from 2005 to 2009).  

For reasons of brevity, the table considers only the main samples used in Phase One and Phase Two of the study, which formed the basis for the report’s principal findings and recommended “guidelines” for land use at the waterfront. Fern Tiger Associates also conducted a small on-line survey (also based on a non-random sample) which did not figure prominently in the report’s final recommendations.

Voices to Vision Sample vs. U.S. Census Data for Albany

Demographic
Profiles

U.S.
Census

Voices to Vision
Phase I Sample

Voices to Vision
Phase II Sample

Ethnicity      White 63% 87% 89%      Asian 28% 6% 6%      Hispanic 9% 2% 1%      Black 3% 1% 0% Median Income $72,516 More than $100,000 More than $100,000 Education      B.A. or higher 70% 93% 93% Housing      Own 53% 88% 92%      Rent 47% 12% 8% Source: U.S. Census, 2005-2009. Voices to Vision, Appendices 6 and 8. 

As the table shows, the sample of those participating in Voices to Vision differs on every important demographic dimension from the population of Albany at large. The study sample was significantly less diverse with respect to ethnicity, more well-to-do, more highly educated, and included a much higher proportion of homeowners than Albany’s general population – as might be expected among the cadre of those most actively engaged in local politics.  

Voices to Vision – especially the process leading up to the report, if not the report itself – undoubtedly has been helpful in fostering greater awareness and discussion within the Albany community about the future of the waterfront. But in claiming to speak for the community, the report crosses the line.

The study sample is conspicuously unrepresentative of the city’s population, and any claim that the study’s findings and proposed “guidelines” reflect the weight of Albany public opinion is therefore unwarranted and invalid. 

Albany resident Saul Geiser is a research associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley. He was formerly director of research on student admissions and outreach for the UC system.

Read more about the process for selecting the proposed second campus of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on Albany Patch here.

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