Survey on local government decision making around environmental hazards

In late 2021, we administered a survey to staff from 2,049 US city governments concerning city decision-making about environmental hazards. It was emailed to the direct email address of the person in each city government pre-identified by the research team as most responsible for or knowledgeable about the survey topic. Follow-ups were administered via mail and phone call. 386 completed surveys were obtained for a response rate of 19%.

A post-card containing a QR code link to the survey was sent to a subset of the survey recipients who did not respond to the initial emailed invitation. This was part of an experiment on the impact of different methods to increase survey response rates. Our published article about this experiment and trends in survey efforts aimed at municipal officials is available here.