update

Answered: Methodology and general questions

nextLI note: Questions may have been minimally edited, or combined with others of similar nature. Some questions may sound oddly phrased, but keep in mind these questions were submitted through text message and few people text the way e e cummings writes.

Define Long Island and NYC in terms of these surveys – is Long Island only Nassau and Suffolk and NYC only Manhattan or all 5 boroughs?

We defined Long Island as Nassau and Suffolk County, and New York City as all five boroughs – Bronx, Queens, Manhattan (New York), Brooklyn (Kings County) and Staten Island (Richmond).

Does people like them mean race?

Fantastic question. We purposelly avoided defining that question in such a manner, we wanted people to project their own thoughts and views in that question. For some people, race is a defining factor in their daily lives and experience. For others, it could be religious or political views, or even ethnic and geographic identity.

Millennials also now include individuals up to age 40. Why is this survey’s age range different?

We did not define our survey as a “Millennial” survey, for various reasons. This was primarily a survey of young adults on Long Island.

But where exactly does “adulthood” begin? We originally considered “post-college” as the start, but after consulting with our Community Advisory Board, we realized that adulthood hits some right after high school and that we were projecting our timeline of life experiences onto Long Island as a whole. Thus the expansion of our sample to 18.

Another part of the reason is that generational theory, or demographic cohorts, are rarely an accurate way of portraying an entire “generation” of people. A “baby boomer” that was an immigrant from the Philippines would have experienced the United States differently than a “baby boomer” that grew up in the Midwest, or New York City.

They are useful for broad studies of an entire nation, perhaps, but nextLI is about Long Island and we wanted to be more specific.

Additionally, there is no official start or end date for any generation, even though certain organizations have adopted one view or another. The Census Bureau have stated that they do not define Millennials.

The survey is opinion, how do various topics align with the data, ie. “affordable” is a personal opinion?

You are definitely right – the survey was to find out the opinions of the “next generation” of Long Islanders.

We do plan on bringing additional data to supplement these discussions, and we’ve already published a number of data posts based on research done by other government agencies or organizations, and we are also continuing the publication and updates of economic indicators.

Again, the goal of this first research component is to start digging into the thoughts and opinions of the next generation of Long Islanders in a specific, methodical and quantifiable manner.

We want to move the discussion away from anecdotal, eg:

My cousin thinks Long Island is unaffordable

To something more precise, eg:

We surveyed more than 1,300 Long Island young adults, ensured that the demographic diversity reflected Long Island’s census data, and found with a 95 percent confidence interval that only 37% of people planning to buy homes plan to do so on Long Island.

Page 11 excludes Hispanics from the ethnic makeup. Please explain why and if Hispanics have increased in population?

Someone mentioned this to us shortly after our event and we sincerely apologize for not explaining this properly in our publication.

We added a note to our site to address this, and we are including that note here as well.

The standards issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) specify that race and Hispanic origin (also known as ethnicity) are two separate and distinct concepts.

The standards include two minimum categories for data on ethnicity: “Hispanic or Latino” and “Not Hispanic or Latino.” Persons who report themselves as Hispanic can be of any race and are identified as such in our data tables.

Source: Census.gov

What this means is that, as structured by the Census, a person can be “Hispanic or Latino” and “White (or other race).” They are two separate questions and not mutually exclusive.

A similar analogy would be a person can be “European” and “Black,” as “European” is likely to be understood as an ethnicity or origin, and not a race.

Our survey included both the definition of race and ethnicity to allow our respondents to self-select what they identify with the most.

How did you define “interact daily with person of another race?”

We did not! Similar to our question on race, we wanted our respondents to answer in a way which they felt was accurate. Moving forward, this is something we plan on digging deeper into in subsequent focus groups or additional surveys.

How many people were surveyed?

A total of 1,805 people were surveyed.

Did you ask any questions about union membership among young people?

Yes we did. We asked if our respondents were members of a public or private union, or not at all. Sixteen percent of them responded “Yes, a public labor union” and 9 percent responded “Yes, a private labor union.” The rest, 75 percent, responded “No.”

Did you ask how many come to Long Island to attend college and stay?

Yes we did. Of the people that moved to Long Island at some stage in their life, 18 percent moved here for secondary education (College or University).

What are the racial demographics of those who were surveyed?

We designed the survey to match the racial and ethnic demographic of Nassau and Suffolk County as reported by the Census Bureau.

White: 61 percent
Black: 11 percent
Hispanic: 17 percent
Asian: 8 percent
Native American: 1 percent
Mixed Race: 2 percent
Middle Eastern: 0 percent
Other: 0 percent

Did the survey ask young adults about availability of affordable childcare or access to universal PreK in their decisions about starting a family on LI? (Compared to NYC which has PreK for All).

Unfortunately, that was not a thread or storyline that we explored with this survey. The scope of this survey did not include that, but we did ask our respondents to rate Long Island as a place to raise children. Eighty five percent rated Long Island as “Good” or “Excellent.”

We have received a number of questions on childcare and education, and this is definitely a topic we would like to pursue further in the future.

What is the demographic breakdown of the respondents?

We asked a number of demography questions, such as race, but we are happy to share other general demography data that we have on our survey group.

18 – 24: 34 percent
25 – 34: 66 percent

High school or less: 19 percent
College degree: 62 percent
Postgraduate degree: 20 percent

Full-time: 58 percent
Part-time: 15 percent
Student: 13 percent
Other: 14 percent

Less than $25,000: 24 percent
$25,000 – $49,999: 21 percent
$50,000 – $79,999: 22 percent
$80,000 – $119,999: 18 percent
$120,000 or more: 16 percent

Why didn’t you print the exact questions asked for each issue in the booklet?

That would have been impractical, as we asked a lot of questions for a number of issues, and some of them are a series of questions in order to accurately gauge the views of our respondents.

Taken out of context, some of the questions might not make any sense at all.

Were all stats from the 18-34 age group of 1800 surveyed?

Yes, we only surveyed young adults in that age group for this study.

How many were from Nassau vs Suffolk county?

Thirty five percent were from Nassau County, and 40 percent from Suffolk County.

Twenty five percent do not currently live on Long Island, but were Long Island residents at some point in their life.