Phoenix Area Social Survey (PASS): 2021

This data package includes raw survey variables from the 2021 implementation of the Phoenix Area Social Survey (PASS), which was established in 2001 as part of the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) project’s long-term monitoring program. Approximately every five years, the CAP LTER surveys households in select neighborhoods in metropolitan Phoenix to examine people’s perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors about landscape decisions, heat stress and climate change, and other risks and their management. Core goals of this research endeavor include minimizing environmental problems, fostering urban conservation, and enhancing human well-being within the fields of urban ecology and sustainability. The PASS also regularly collects data on predictor variables including environmental values or worldviews and socio-demographics. In 2021, new questions were added to better understand residents’ health and wellbeing, how people perceive and interact with wildlife, and how outdoor recreational activities changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. As background, the first PASS was piloted in 2001 in 8 neighborhoods (n= 302) in the City of Phoenix. The 2006 (n= 808) and 2011 (n= 806) samples then expanded to a broader range of neighborhoods (40-45), aiming for 20 respondents per neighborhood, which were strategically selected to represent the geography of the greater metropolitan area in terms of location, income, and other demographics. The revised sampling design allows for intensive neighborhood analyses that link residents’ perceptions, attitudes, and decisions to the local urban ecological infrastructure, as well as other biophysical features such as bird community composition and diversity measures. In 2017, the PASS sample was redesigned to target a larger number of people (~65) in fewer (12) neighborhoods across the region (final n = 496 with response rate of 39%). For PASS 2021, we achieved a total sample size of 509 with a 37% response rate. Across 2017–2021, 235 repeat respondents participated, amounting to a response rate of 46% of the longitudinal sampling frame (n=496). By linking the social survey data to various environmental datasets, the overarching question for the CAP LTER IV project, which spanned 2016 to 2022, was: *How do the services provided by dynamic urban ecosystems and their infrastructure affect human outcomes and behavior, and how do human actions affect patterns in urban ecosystem structure and function, and ultimately, urban sustainability?* For more information on PASS 2021 and the survey neighborhoods, review the PDF report (PASS2021report_final.pdf) in this data package, as well as the methods, protocols, and metadata. Materials include the codebook with footnotes and annotations for data sources and details on verbatim questions (e.g., when they were added or modified), in addition to the questionnaire mailed to residents (two versions for repeat households and newly drawn households). For time-series analyses, researchers can separately download the 2017 or earlier datasets and link them to respondents across each survey by unique CASE ID numbers. Although the data are published for public use and benefits, we request that researchers who use the survey data contact [e-mail] to avoid duplicate analyses and publications and to coordinate among a large network of scholars who use the PASS data. This is very important since investigators continue to analyze the datasets as a part of the CAP LTER. For a list of publications from PASS 2021 or earlier, please refer to the metadata file or visit our website. You can also email Kelli Larson for any publications released after July 2025.