Conducting a Community Assessment

Your community assessment will be based on two types of data sources: secondary and primary. Start your data collection with secondary sources: data that has already been collected by others. Other members of your community may have the information that you are looking for. Start with local sources of information and then broaden your search as necessary. Focus on quality of data, as opposed to quantity, so you can dedicate more time to other aspects of the community assessment.

Primary data is data collected by the person or group conducting the assessment. Primary source data collection methods should be used to address questions that cannot be answered by secondary sources or to gain a better understanding of a particular issue. There are several methods for collecting primary sources of data for your community assessment, including questionnaires, observation, focus groups, interviews, and case studies.