The City of Airdrie is piloting a social well-being survey to determine the welfare of the community following the COVID-19 pandemic and to determine the needs of its residents.
According to Chris Easselmont, social planner with the City, social well-being is an important determinant in helping the municipality develop a high quality of life for Airdrie residents and in order for society to thrive.
He said in April 2020, City council adopted a ‘social policy’ and committed City staff to working towards strengthening social well-being in the community.
“But in order to really understand where we’re already doing well in terms of social well-being, and where there’s room for improvement, we need to understand the current state – where we are now,” Easselmont said in an interview. “The goal is the Social Well-being Survey will help us understand this.”
He added the City is hoping to help various community organizations to better serve residents via a pilot survey which is currently in the field, followed by a more fulsome questionnaire to help form effective strategies in the fall.
“The pilot is for us to get a preliminary understanding of what we’re measuring,” he said, noting social well-being is a complex concept. “It’s no single one question that can answer it, so we need to make sure we’re actually capturing what we need to understand.”
Easselmont added both the in-house pilot survey and broader questionnaire to be unveiled in the fall are invitation-only, with letters being sent out to randomly selected households with instructions on how to access the survey.
“The reason we took this approach is to help make sure the data we collect is representative of the community as a whole,” he said.
According to the City employee, the idea for the survey stemmed from not knowing the current state of well-being in the community.
“We have a goal to work toward something and we don’t know where we are right now, so we really needed to figure out that baseline level, so we know where to direct our efforts,” he said.
“What we’re hoping is the results will help us understand the current state of social well-being in Airdrie.”
Easselmont said the results will help the City to determine where it is currently doing well in serving its residents, where residents are thriving, and conversely, where work needs to be done to improve quality of life with various social programming.
“The hope is the results of this survey will let us be able to design future work for the City and help various social agencies in the community tailor solutions to meet specific challenges that are being faced by residents,” he said.
According to Easselmont, social well-being as the City understands it, is comprised of five elements: social acceptance, social inclusion, social support, social contributions, and social capital.
“We’re trying to measure across all five of those areas and we’re including a very comprehensive list of demographic questions so we can try and understand if there are differences across subpopulations in Airdrie,” he said.
“The reason we want to try and pull out these subgroup differences is to tailor solutions to meet specific needs of groups that are facing challenges rather than trying a one-size fits all approach.”
He added a community report will follow the public engagement initiative and will enable the municipality to make any adjustments deemed necessary to the survey prior to the wider rollout in the fall.
“It will be a larger number of residents and we will be doing an engagement plan to try and make people aware of the survey and get people interested and bought in to responding," he said.
The fall survey is anticipated to open to residents in October. The results will be shared with council in early 2023.
