The Center for Community Studies at Jefferson Community College (State University of New York) in Watertown, New York was created in 1999. It supports and facilitates a wide range of community-building and educational activities that engage the Northern New York State community. Twice annually the Center completes omnibus surveys of adult residents as services to the communities. Each autumn a community-indicator and quality-of-life survey has been completed, generating a 25+ year longitudinal motion-picture type of body of information that is used by community leaders in decision-making and better understanding life in the region. Each spring the omnibus survey completed by the Center is more of a snapshot in time by including current issues of importance to residents, and as a result, has a potentially different survey instrument each year. Additionally, in collaboration and under contracts with community partners the Center has completed hundreds of public opinion research surveys for communities and organizations that represent virtually every community sector, including healthcare, education, tourism, economic development, substance abuse services, housing and homelessness, food security, mental health services, eldercare issues, childcare, youth opportunities, policing and crime control, energy generation, and many more. The Center conducts rigorous unbiased community-based research and provides a forum for productive discussion of ideas and issues of significance to the community. The Center does not typically engage in election polling. The Center conducts research that will benefit the local population and engages in activities that reflect its commitment to enhancing the quality of life of the area.
The Center is currently staffed by three faculty members and guided by a 25-person Advisory Board of Directors comprised of college administration, county leadership, and community stakeholders representing the four Northern New York counties of Jefferson, Lewis, Oswego, and St. Lawrence. These Upstate NY counties are very small in population, and as a result, over the past quarter-century the Center has developed very effective sampling and statistical modeling procedures to adequately obtain large and representative samples of adults from these small county populations. Although each study is unique and presents its own challenges in obtaining a sample, challenges that the Center individually addresses for each client and study, currently the most common modes of outreach employed by the Center in its public opinion research involve a multi-mode sampling approach utilizing all of: live interviewer phone calling, random email invitation to complete surveys online, MMS text push-to-web invitations to complete surveys online, and intercept sampling for particularly difficult and historically underrepresented subpopulations.
The Center for Community Studies has been a member of the AAPOR Transparency Initiative since 2019, and a member of the Association of Academic Survey research Organizations (AASRO) since 2024.
Explore survey data from The Center for Community Studies at Jefferson Community College here