When “Good Enough” Isn’t Good Enough
If you’re using the crowd to solve complex problems, you need to understand where and why the system fails for some people, not just how it works for most. Community surveys are everywhere. They’re quick, familiar, and often treated as the voice of the residents. But what if that voice is only telling part of the story? Our latest paper, “Calibrating Resident Surveys with Operational Data in Community Planning,” takes a closer look at a simple but important question: what do survey responses actually measure? At first glance, a result like “85–90% satisfaction” sounds reassuring. But averages can be misleading. They combine very different experiences into a single number - masking the fact that some residents encounter problems frequently, while others rarely do. Satisfaction, it turns out, is not uniform. It depends on when you visit, how often you use a facility, where you live, and what you expect. This paper introduces a new way to interpret survey results by linking them dire...
