Annual Survey of Orange County 1991

This 1991 survey examines ten years of trends in the Orange County Annual Survey. In asking questions from the 1982 benchmark survey, the focus is on the county's quality of life ratings and local public service ratings. The survey also examines changes over time in attitudes towards traffic congestion and growth, which have been the county's top two policy issues in the past decade. The sample size is 1,002 Orange County adult residents.
Online data analysis & additional documentation in Link below.
Methods
The Orange County Annual Survey was co-directed by Mark Baldassare, a UC Irvine professor of social ecology, and Cheryl Katz, research associate. For the survey, 1,002 adult Orange County residents were interviewed by telephone Sept. 3 to 20.
Interviewing was conducted on weekend days and weekday nights, using a computer-generated random sample of telephone numbers.
The field work was conducted at the Center for Survey Research at UCI. Of the telephone numbers called, 21 percent resulted in completed interviews and 14 percent were refusals. The completion rate for the survey was 60 percent, consistent with earlier Orange County Annual Surveys.
Within a household, respondents were chosen for interview using the Troldahl-Carter method. This method randomly selects a household member from a grid that includes information on the number of adult household members and the number of adult men in the household. Each interview included 93 questions and took an average of 20 minutes to complete.

The interview began with questions about housing, consumer confidence, and general perceptions about Orange County. These were followed by questions on transportation, the quality of life, public service ratings, the environment, and air quality proposals. Later in the interview, we turned to the issues of health care and charity. The conclusion of the survey was devoted to questions about work, commuting, demographics, and politics.
For analysis, we statistically weighted the sample to represent the actual regional distribution of Orange County residents, as in previous surveys. The 1990 U.S. Census population figures by city were reviewed for this purpose.
The sampling error for this survey is +/-3 percent at the 95 percent confidence level. This means that 95 times out of 100, the results will be within 3 percentage points of what they would be if all adults in Orange County were interviewed. The sampling error for any subgroup would be larger. Sampling error is just one type of error to which surveys are subject.
Results may also be affected by question wording, survey timing and survey design.