Restoring Order: When Efforts to Obtain Minority Respondents Yield Greater than Expected Returns

Achieving proportionate minority representation in community surveys is often difficult. Such was the case in previous attempts to obtain a demographically representative sample of adults living in one southern city whose adult population of slightly more than 26,000 adults was majority white but with large numbers of black and Hispanic residents. Bringing together in a survey about community perceptions a combination of methods often used in health and marketing research and depending heavily on the cooperation of minority ministerial alliances and their member churches, the intended numbers of respondents in every one of 18 strata of a quota sample were exceeded—sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot. The original strata quotas were based on the known age, sex, and race/Hispanic status of the adult population. A simple weighting procedure easily adaptable to other community surveys was then used to restore population proportions to what had become a disproportionate sample. This research brief describes that weighting procedure along with the techniques employed to obtain respondents, the design of the quota sample, and a synopsis of the differences found, particularly by race/Hispanic status and by age, in both importance of and satisfaction with 20 different city characteristics.