Residents' Panel survey – recruitment, libraries and the Internet

At the County Council we are committed to getting the views of local residents before making decisions that affect you. One way we do this is by having a residents’ panel.

The recruitment process

Our current panel was recruited in two stages:

1. September to December 2007
   350 current members agreed to remain on the panel
2. January to March 2008
   1,550 new members were recruited by NWA Research, including young people and Black and Minority Ethnic people.

How do members use libraries and the Internet?

As part of the recruitment process we asked panel members questions about using libraries and the Internet. Our survey found:

• 62% of those who responded were library members and nearly half of them had used the library once or more each month within the last 12 months
• the most popular reasons for using the library were to borrow books (90%) or to borrow CDs or DVDs (31%)
• 76% don’t use the library because they are too busy and a fifth of non-users find the location difficult to reach
• 82% have regular access to a computer mostly at home and nearly half of them at work
• 97% used the computer for the Internet, with the most popular reasons being to talk to family or friends (86%), shopping (80%), find local information (78%) or to book travel or holidays (71%)
• favourite websites included news and weather sites, topped by the BBC
• 51% of respondents had visited the County Council’s website – nearly three quarters (70%) found it easy (52%) or very easy (18%) to find the information they were looking for, however one in ten found it difficult (8%) or very difficult (2%).

For the full results and more details about how the recruitment surveys were carried out, please download the documents below.

The summary report includes three Appendices showing the questionnaires and a summary of the different responses to questions asked.

The detailed report included three further Appendices which you can download separately below.

How to join the panel

To find out how you can join the panel, see our page about the East Sussex Residents' Panel.

Acrobat (PDF)
Residents' Panel recruitment survey - summary report (217k) Includes two questionnaires – the original 350 members only answered questions about themselves and how they wanted to be consulted. From January, new members were asked questions about themselves and how they use libraries and the Internet.
Residents' Panel recruitment survey - full details and analysis (221k) Includes detailed tables and graphs of all the results. (19 pages)
Residents' Panel recruitment survey - NWA report, appendix 1 (82k) Data from the NWA part of the recruitment survey, showing unweighted results.
Residents' Panel recruitment survey - NWA report, appendix 2 (116k) Data from the NWA part of the recruitment survey, showing results weighted by age group and gender to reflect the population of the area.
Residents' Panel recruitment survey - NWA report, appendix 3 (34k) Data from the NWA part of the recruitment survey, showing responses to open-ended questions.