ELKHART — A recent survey conducted by Vibrant Communities shows Elkhart County residents are hopeful about the future.

But the survey also revealed a decrease in perception of the quality of the schools in Elkhart County.

“With these surveys, they measure attitudes and perceptions,” said David Blouin, associate professor of sociology at Indiana University South Bend, who was involved in conducting the survey. “They’re not objective. We can’t tell whether the schools have actually changed in terms of quality, but we get a sense of how people feel things may have changed.”

The survey asked a series of questions, where the respondents had to answer on a 1 to 5 scale, with 1 representing the lowest score and 5 representing the highest score. There were also open-ended questions that required written answers.

It started as a mail survey but expanded to increase the numbers and representation of various demographics.

In all, 5,000 surveys were mailed to Elkhart County residents. Stacks of surveys also were distributed around the county. In addition, online surveys were offered in both English and Spanish.

Students from Blouin’s Research Methods class pulled aside people from events in Elkhart County to conduct an in-person survey. The three events were the Island of Blues festival, Elkhart Hispanic Heritage Festival and the Goshen Hispanic Heritage Festival.

Blouin first got involved with the survey project when a previous survey was done in 2021. The 2021 survey asked similar questions and he was instrumental in crafting this survey.

“With my Research Methods course, I’ve been involved in a bunch of different community, research-based projects,” Blouin said. “And a lot of times it’s been with people in Elkhart.”

All of the surveys were compiled in November. Of all the surveys sent out, about 500 were completed.

“We had a very small representation of both Hispanics and African Americans,” Murray said. “In fact, we had more people identify as Asian American than African American at that time.”

Murray also noted that most Hispanic respondents opted to take the survey in English.

The typical profile for a respondent of the survey was a white female, married, baby boomer, who has lived in Elkhart for over 20 years, a homeowner and has no kids at home.

“Low-cost housing remains a problem,” said Bil Murray, a Vibrant Communities leader. “And that’s an issue that’s identified both in the survey results and in the comments.”

Most popular among respondents were the parks, trails and recreation. Most of the community’s social offerings score relatively low.

Blouin also said based on the survey’s results, people seem to feel safe in their neighborhoods.

“One thing we have not done that we are talking about doing next time around is to do some focus groups about how important some of these things are in different communities,” Murray said.

The survey takes 10 to 15 minutes to complete. Murray said the paper-and-pencil version of the survey could have been daunting to people.

“The survey is very thorough in terms of what we ask,” Murray said. “One of the complaints about the survey is that it’s long to complete.”