Thinking about Derwenthorpe: survey results

In February 2020, just before the COVID-19 lockdown, Derwenthorpe Residents Association surveyed residents views on community infrastructure: the things that make it easy to get to know your neighbours. 

We knocked on every door on the estate, and asked people to complete our survey on paper, or online. Where there was no answer, we left a copy of the survey, which included the address of the online survey. In all, we got 123 responses, which is about 25% of all households. So, not completely representative, but we thought it was quite good given that we didn’t follow up.

There’s a more detailed report available:

What do you like about Derwenthorpe?

We asked “What do you like about Derwenthorpe?”, and tagged the answers, with one or more of these themes:

Tags	Number	Per cent	notes
Community	75	61%	Incl “neighbours”, and “people”
Green space	69	57%	Incl “lakes”, and “wildlife”
Houses	54	44%	Incl internal utility and external appearance.
Transport	28	23%	Incl cycle route 66, buses, and access to A64
Quietness	27	22%
Location	24	20%
Sustainability	17	14%
Safety	9	7.4%
No response	5	4.1%
Diversity	4	3.3%
Negative	3	2.5%
community space	2	1.6%

What community events have you attended in the last 12 months?

We asked which of these events you’d participated in, in the past year. 80% of you had been to one or more events. And, on average, people had been to four of these types of event.

To create a true community building, which of the following are needed? 

We asked what you facilities you thought were important for a community centre.

Facility	Ticked	%
Kitchen	93	75.6%
Toilets	88	71.5%
Storage	58	47.2%
Larger Meeting Rooms	62	50.4%
Process for Booking	85	69.1%
Disabled Access	69	56.1%
Parking	21	17.1%
Other	49	39.8%

We asked what the best time to hold events would be. Of course, it will depend on the event, but here’s what you said:

Household composition

We asked about the numbers of adults and children in each household. We’ve summarised the results in this table. Of the 78 children reported, twenty were under 4, forty-three were 4 to 10, and fifteen were 11 to 16. There were 232 adults reported.

Household composition	number of households
One adult, no children	18
One adult, with children	4
Two adults, no children	46
Two adults, 1 child	19
Two adults, 2 children	20
Two adults, 3 children	4
Three or more adults	10

Thank you

We’re grateful to those who responded. And, we’re sorry it took so long to publish these results. Things kind of got in the way in 2020! Please let us know if you have any comments or questions. The survey happened just before the first COVID lockdown. Do you think differently about Derwenthorpe now?