Workshop Description:

Surveys are a great tool to gather information about a community or a specific topic of interest. Good surveys that deliver credible and meaningful results take time and careful planning to design because the questions need to be asked in a way that will accurately measure the opinions, experiences, and behaviors of the community. In this workshop, participants can expect to learn the basics of how to design an effective survey that is clear, engaging, and asks useful questions that avoid unintentional bias.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify the applications of surveys in community work
2. Apply the steps entailed in survey development
3. Develop valid, reliable, relevant, and readable items for a survey
4. Demonstrate how to employ a survey in community work
5. Identify common sources of error in survey administration and how to overcome them

Manoj Sharma, MBBS, Ph.D., MCHES^® is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Health in the School of Public Health at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has taught over 6,000 students in his career and has worked at local, state, national, and international levels in public health for over 35 years. He is ranked in the top one percentile of scientists globally by Elsevier. His research interests are in developing evidence-based health promotion interventions, survey research, integrative health, and community-based participatory research (CBPR).

Jamie Ross has been the Executive Director of the PACT Coalition since 2011. She has been involved with substance misuse prevention from a young age and has turned her lifelong passion for bettering the community into a career, helping to create system-wide change geared toward reducing substance misuse.

The PACT Coalition is the largest substance misuse prevention coalition in Las Vegas with diverse funding focused on the full spectrum of prevention, including mental health, primary and tertiary substance misuse prevention, and the intersection of prevention into all aspects of community building.

As the Executive Director, Jamie oversees all programs and funding, writes grants, and manages staff. Since its inception, she has helped the PACT Coalition grow to ten times its original funding and capacity. Jamie believes in the power of the community to change itself for the better. When a community comes together to solve its own problems, the results are powerful and transformative. As Sam Quinones says, the solution to the opioid crisis isn’t naloxone, it’s the community.

When Jamie isn’t working, she can be found hiking and climbing or watching the latest superhero movie with her husband.

Elizabeth Moore is a Project Coordinator at the PACT Coalition, where she is responsible for coordinating primary prevention efforts for Southern Nevada specifically through the revision and presentation of timely prevention data. This role allows Elizabeth to support the Clark Regional Behavioral Health Policy Board by connecting the substance misuse and behavioral health community. Elizabeth especially enjoys the community outreach aspect of her work, as she is always excited to have the opportunity to connect with locals.

Elizabeth also has experience working as a Research Assistant at the Nevada Institute of Children’s Research and Policy and as a Student Intern at the Southern Nevada Health District. She completed her Master’s degree in Public Health with an emphasis in Social and Behavioral Health from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2020. In 2022, she became a Certified Prevention Specialist.

Chelsi Cheatom has been working with Trac-B Exchange since 2016 as the Program Manager. She has helped to support Trac-B Exchange opening the first storefront syringe exchange in Clark County, NV as well as supporting the roll-out of the Impact Exchange vending machine project which now has 5 public health/ syringe vending machines placed in the Las Vegas community. Prior to working at Trac-B Exchange, Chelsi oversaw the STD and Adult Viral Hepatitis grant programs for the State of Nevada’s Division of Public and Behavioral Health’s Office of Public Health Informatics and Epidemiology and was a Disease Investigation and Intervention Specialist with the Southern Nevada Health District. Chelsi earned a Master’s degree in Health Promotion from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2010.

Funding Disclosure: *This project is supported by the Nevada State Division of Public and Behavioral Health through Grant Number 1 NH75OT000092-01-00 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Division nor the CDC. Any activities performed under this sub-award shall acknowledge the funding was provided through the Division by Grant Number 1 NH75OT000092-01-00 from the CDC.