IT-блоги • Case study: a city social survey

Imagine a city mayor considering a project offering to build parks in several neighborhoods. It can be a good budget investment since it can potentially increase the happiness level of the citizens. However, it is just a hypothesis: if parks do not impact happiness, it is worth considering other city renovation projects. It makes sense to perform a pilot experiment before spending the budget on all the parks. The mayor is thinking about the following plan: pick a random neighborhood, survey the citizens to measure their happiness, build a park, survey the citizens again, compare the survey results, make a decision about the further parks in other neighborhoods. Someone is needed to design the survey and draw the conclusion.

Let us explore possible approaches to perform such a study. These artificial examples are not guidelines but rather simplified illustrations of possible mindsets presented as lists of thoughts. In this demonstration, we mainly focus on the attitude to the research process rather than on the technical details. All the examples are based on real stories.