Feb 27, 2021.

A very elegant presentation  of highlights  was made today at the HOA ZOOM meeting regarding the HOA survey, but mostly it was useless except for some fine-tuning including more committees and more use of social media.  The numbers were too small.

Only about 336 responses came in, and nearly 50% were non-HOA members.  This total number represents 10% of the census population in the Grove which is 3,323.    But how many survey voters were not residents?    Only residents should have been counted.

The selection process was nonexistent.  Groups like the Chamber and the Parking Alliance got to distribute the surveys. There undoubtedly was selection bias: we don’t know who voted. The participants should have been defined in the study. Were they?  The complete survey has yet to be distributed.

This was a survey of the OGHOA fan club and nothing more.  Nothing but praise was found.

The surveyors said that the positivity of the results is “rare” and “impressive,” but useless data cannot, by definition, be “impressive.  “Impressive” is just an opinion and not fact.

The surveyors concluded that the HOA has an exceptional popularity and “image”  among the respondents, but that “data” was useless due to small numbers.  Besides, popularity is easy to elicit in a survey, but data assessment over serious issues, such as taxes, was totally ignored and in one instance, a question by a member of the audience regarding taxes, was repelled by the moderator.

Read our last piece on Blogfinger.net to see the litany of important topics that were mostly ignored in this “research” study. Just scroll down.

The survey spent its time worrying about the popularity of the HOA, but there was no analysis of what important results the HOA has achieved, such as their unconscionable support of OGNED at the North End.

About the only original idea that was sent up as a giant smoke signal was to allow renters to join and then to change the name –a good idea, but hardly worth the time that was spent on it.

Pres. Richard Williams thought that the study would be valuable to guide the HOA into the future, but his opinion on this is over-optimistic unless the goal is a higher stack of shuffled papers.

As for the ZOOM audience, they were so impressed or sedated that there was not a single question at the end.

The whole study will be made available for your review.  But it would be better to have an unbiased  statistician look it over and report to the Board and to us.  Probably a statistics 101 student could do the job.

We need that because no Board member attempted to publicly judge the validity of this survey; not even the lawyer in the group.    Are they merely going to uncritically accept the result?  Of course they are because this survey is incestuous. One of the two surveyors is a member of the HOA Board.

And here’s an example of another biased survey:

Gene Austin from the 1920’s.

Paul Goldfinger, Editor  Blogfinger.netr