City of Ithaca
Chief of Police Search Process
Community Input Results
How the Results Were Obtained
Background
This document provides some details on how we obtained the results of the community process designed to identify the characteristics that members of the Ithaca community would like to see in the next Chief of Police.The process began in the Fall of 1996 with community brainstorming of a large set of statements describing specific characteristics members of the community wanted to see in the next Chief. Members of the Ithaca community could submit statements in several ways: at the two community brainstorming forums; through the 24-hour telephone line; at drop-off boxes around the city; using mail-in forms printed in the newspaper; and directly on a world wide web site. A total of 310 statements were generated.
The Screening Committee then consolidated these statements into a final set of 74 characteristics, trying as much as possible to preserve the detail and representativeness of the original statements.
In January of 1997, the members of the community organized the statements. Each participating community member grouped the statements into groups that were similar in meaning, and each rated the statements for their relative importance on a 1-to-5 scale. People could participate through the community forum or by picking up materials and submitting their responses at drop-off boxes around the city.
The information was analyzed using a method known as concept mapping that was designed to aggregate data of this type and obtain the final results.
Results
The input for the concept mapping analysis was the sorting or grouping data obtained from community participants. Each participant was given a deck of cards with one characteristic on each card and was asked to group the characteristics into piles of similar ones and to provide a short label for each group. This information was entered into The Concept System© computer program and the basic mapping analysis was performed. (For more information about concept mapping or the computer program see the Concept Systems Incorporated website).The first result that the program produces is the Characteristics Point Map that shows each of the 74 characteristics in relation to each other. In general, the two statements were grouped together in the same group, the closer they will be on this map. Therefore, statements that are closer to each other on the map are more similar conceptually (as judged by the participants who grouped them) and those that are further apart are less similar. The Screening Committee reviewed this map to see which statements wound up in which areas of the map.
Next, the analysis groups the statements into clusters as shown in the Characteristics Point-Cluster Map. In this analysis, the program grouped the 74 characteristics into nine clusters or categories. The map encloses the statements in each category within a polygon-shaped figure. The Characteristics By Category Listing shows the 74 characteristics as they were grouped by the analysis into nine clusters, or broad categories of characteristics. The labels for each cluster were determined by the Screening Committee. The Screening Committee reviewed each of the nine categories of characteristics and generated a short label that describes the statements in each category.
The category map showing only the nine categories (and not the individual 74 characteristics) is shown in the Labeled Category Map. This map was used as the basis for the final Community Process Results Figure which shows the same nine categories arranged in approximately the same location as in this figure, but is a slightly more "stylized" and less technical portrayal of the results and would probably be more understandable to the general public.
The Community Process Results Figure shows the nine clusters of characteristics the community would like to see in the next Chief. This figure and the Characteristics By Category Listing describe the final results of the community input. They show nine fairly broad categories of characteristics that the community would like to see in the next Chief that are useful for thinking about the "big picture" view of the community. The 74 statements give us more detail about what these categories mean to members of the community.
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This project is sponsored in part by:
Concept Systems Incorporated |
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