The Utah Wellbeing Project is a plan to gather personal and community wellbeing perspectives across Utah cities to inform city leaders and their general planning process. Right now, the survey is being conducted in Helper, Price and Wellington and residents can access it through each of the city’s websites or social media pages. Castle Country Radio was able to speak over the phone with Dr. Courtney Flint, Community Resources Specialist about what the survey entails.
“The questions we’re trying to get at are how are people’s overall wellbeing, how’s life for them in general, but then also in different categories. Then we also include quite a few questions about their city, community, how they feel about changes and issues, things in their landscape. We ask quite a few demographics because not only are we interested in how wellbeing is going for people across our Utah cities but also within them, how different people might be fairing with changes,” said Dr. Flint. They started to conduct the survey last year in January and February but then COVID hit. So the Utah Wellbeing Project decided to partner again with Utah cities to run the surveys again to see if anything has been changing given the pandemic.
They are taking the previous surveys and will compare them to the ones being conducted this year. “One of the things that we are interested in finding out is if people’s connection with nature and being outside has improved as some of the other options have been shut off. But we would expect some of the social connections to perhaps decrease. Maybe living standards, if people are having a difficult time with employment and/or running a business. So those are some of the things we are looking for with changes over time,” stated Dr. Flint.
Residents who wish to participate in the survey can expect to spend an average of 10 minutes completing the survey and you must be 18 years of age. “So we got really till the rest of February, we’ll keep them open till the end of February for all three of these cities. Helper has been going for a few weeks, but Price and Wellington are just getting going. I don’t want East Carbon people to feel left out we’re trying to reach out to East Carbon City to get them involved in the survey as well, and if do we’ll be sure to make that link available too,” said Dr. Flint.
The following are the links to the to the Wellbeing Survey:
Helper survey link: https://tinyurl.com/yy8oukfm
Price survey link: https://tinyurl.com/y4fm7yb8
Wellington survey link: https://tinyurl.com/jceupja8
East Carbon survey link: https://tinyurl.com/3zwxye6w
The results of the survey will be shared with each of the cities. “We will process each city’s report and get it back to them as soon as we can, then urge them to share those reports with their residents. We will also that once we have all the surveys across Utah then we do a statewide report, and we also make that available to the cities and urge them to share that with their residents,” said Dr. Flint. The results can also be found on the Utah State University Extension Utah Wellbeing Project website.