Study guide: Evaluate a Civic Consultation
Audit sample reach, neutral wording, missing-response denominators, and explicit decision criteria.
Ideas to explain in your own words
- Separate a sample’s preferences from a whole-community claim.
- Remove supplied leading wording and separate two preferences into answerable items.
- Distinguish invitations, responses, and support without assigning opinions to nonrespondents.
- Use a fictional threshold and resource cap while keeping consultation evidence qualified.
Watch your reasoning
- The result is about the actual respondents. The survey did not measure town-wide support or the opinions of the omitted groups, so those claims would invent evidence.
- Distinct items let respondents express different preferences about the three decisions. Emphasis or narrower recruitment does not fix bundling.
- The same numerical percentage occurs with distinct numerators and denominators. The missing-opinion range is a logical bound, not a confidence interval.
- A and C qualify, and A has the larger recorded support count. The rule uses hours as a cap, not as the ranking criterion.
A worked review example
Evaluate a civic survey’s reach: 30/40 = 75% of surveyed Tuesday art-club attendees said yes. That supports interest within the responding group. It does not establish 75% support among everyone who uses the centre. Rewrite a Consultation Question: “For the next three months, should the centre add weekend art sessions? Support / oppose / unsure. Ask the same separately for sport. Then ask whether any current quiet-hour sessions should be replaced, with keep all / replace some / unsure. Paper copies and spoken reading reduce digital and reading barriers, while sampling reach still needs review.” Report Denominators and Missing Responses: “Respondent support is 36/60=60%; response rate is 60/100=60%. Among the 100 invitees, known support is at least 36 and could be at most 36+40=76. Missing responses cannot be called opposition. Unregistered drop-in users were not invited.” Compare Options Under a Stated Decision Rule: “A and C meet both conditions; B exceeds six hours. A has sixteen support responses versus C’s fourteen, so A ranks first under the stated rule. C would use two fewer room-hours. The result uses a voluntary poll and does not establish all-user preference.”
Make a practice plan
- Try the supplied lesson problems without looking at the answers.
- Compare your method with the worked examples and explain any correction.
- Use the new review cases, then complete the transfer task on paper or in your own document.