BRIMBANK residents are disappointed a new council survey aimed at guiding the city’s planning included less than 2 per cent of the population.
The 2012 household survey was distributed to 1000 of Brimbank’s 182,735 residents last month.
The survey asked questions ranging from the person’s nationality, mental stability and yearly income to where they shop for items including clothing and daily needs.
Keilor resident Joe Marino said he was outraged that he was the only resident on his block who was surveyed.
“In my opinion, the survey is a waste of time and money because it wasn’t a community-based survey that was working towards improving some of the area’s major issues,” he said.
Mr Marino said he wanted to see questions relating to youth and the elderly.
“What is the council going to do to engage youth and how are they helping the elderly?” he said. “It’s upset a lot of locals because we want to see money better spent elsewhere to improve services, not on a survey where we don’t even know if the results will ever be made public.”
Fellow Keilor resident Despina Havelas said the number of interviews was too small. “At the very least they should be interviewing 5 or 10 per cent of the population. How can they get a clear indication of what’s happening in the community with such a small snapshot?”
Victoria University senior lecturer Segu Zuhair said while there was no set number of respondents required for a survey, respondents must be selected at random. “As Brimbank is very multicultural, they would also need to consider other aspects particularly how they word questions and what types of questions are used,” he said. “Some words can have different meanings in different cultures and that could pose an issue or if a person didn’t understand the question properly they might not be able to answer it accurately.”
Council’s acting general manager community of well-being, Neil Whiteside, said a number of census collection districts were randomly selected with households in these areas asked to participate. He said the survey’s findings would be reported before year’s end.
