Fieldwork Activities
Collecting Data on Parents Perceptions and Beliefs about School Choice
A key component of the research project was to better understand what parents were considering when they were making their school applications. Instead of assuming parents are fully informed about the assignment probabilities associated with each application, the research project required first hand data on what parents were thinking. The work done to document parents views required visiting hundreds of families in 2015, 2017 and 2019. None of this work would have been possible without the patience and good will from New Haven Public School parents that volunteered their time to collaborate with the research project.
2019 School Choice Survey
We are currently conducting a new survey! Our registered surveyors are:
- David Diaz
- Luis Rivera
- Faith Kim
- Carole Chu
- Genna Altman The project manager is Manuel Martinez.
2017 School Choice Survey
We conducted a survey of 302 families with rising 9th graders during the 2017 summer. Our survey asked a representative sample of parents/guardians about the school choice process including:
- How the family gathered information about available schools and about the school choice process.
- Which schools they liked the most, and why they did so.
- How well they understood the rules of the school choice process.
- What they thought their chances of admission were for actual and hypothetical application portfolios.
We conducted the survey using an interactive tablet application that updated questions in response to respondent's inputs. We used a bilingual survey team to ensure we could capture a representative sample of New Haven households.
2015 School Choice Survey
We conducted a home survey of 212 New Haven households with children entering kindergarten and ninth grade in Fall 2015. Our survey asked a representative sample of parents/guardians about the school choice process, including:
- How the family gathered information about available schools and about the school choice process.
- Which schools they liked the most, and why they did so.
- How well they understood the rules of the school choice process.
- What they thought their chances of admission were for actual and hypothetical application portfolios.
We conducted the survey using an interactive tablet application that updated questions in response to respondent's inputs. We used a bilingual survey team to ensure we could capture a representative sample of New Haven households.