DOI: 10.3886/e120553
title: Public Opinion on School Board Trustees in Canada

description: The data in this study is being collected to catalogue previously asked questions about Trustees in Canada in preparation for a study examining attitudes towards the role of Trustees in Ontario. The data referenced in this study is from the period 1993 to 1997.
description: This section outlines the approach used to gather survey questions for inclusion in the dataset. <br> <br>Datasets for this study were collected primarily from ODESI. Searches were also conducted on Forum Research, Mainstreet, Abacus Data, Nanos, Ekos, Gallup, Dataverse, Angus Reid Forum, Environics, Leger, Pew Research Center, Oracle Poll, University of Toronto, National Longitudinal Surveys, Roper Center, Compass, Library and Archives Canada, Mustel Group, Pollara, Som Research and Surveys, and Decima, but no relevant results were found. For searches conducted on ODESI, the following collections were selected: Public Opinion Polls, Other Data, Canadian Opinion Research Archive, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, and Canadian Dataverses, and the time period was set to include all survey results. <br><br>The following terms were used in searches to find public opinion survey questions related to School Board Trustees: school board trustee, trustees, governing board.<br><br>All surveys were reviewed by Lindsay Mewhiney and Monika Nawrocki to determine if they contained questions about school board trustees. Any survey data related to school board trustees was recorded in a word document for review by the third member of the research team (Anthony Piscitelli) who made the final determination of which questions would be included in the database. <br><br>The word document file contains a record of the search results that were recorded in a table to track the findings for this study. The table kept a record of the date searched, the number of results found, the question, the variables (answers), who was asked, and the firm that conducted the survey. <br><br>Potential search terms were divided between the two researchers (Lindsay Mewhiney and Monika Nawrocki). Once the researchers felt they had exhausted all relevant search results, they exchanged terms and briefly reviewed the results of each term to ensure that relevant surveys had not been overlooked. Any duplicate survey results were removed from the table and any overlooked survey results were added.<br><br>The survey data from the term tracker was recorded within a spreadsheet template on Microsoft Excel (by Jennifer Peers). Data accuracy was verified by a second researcher (Monika Nawrocki). Survey questions were selected by Anthony Piscitelli based on their relevance to the topic of the role of school board trustees. Additional questions from a 1997 Environics Focus Canada survey not directly asking about Trustees were included as they provide a comparison for trustees.<br><br> Each question selected by the project manager was allocated a survey ID number from survey ID #1 to survey ID #9. The Excel sheets are labelled (except for the first page) using the survey ID # for the appropriate survey question. The first Excel sheet contains a list of the ten survey questions with their allocated survey ID #, the firm responsible for the data and the population surveyed for the data. The Excel sheets following the first page include the survey question, the variables and their values, the year of the data’s publication, the sample size of the survey, and a link to the survey data.
description: Adults.