Baltimore Area Survey

Overview

The Baltimore Area Survey (BAS) is a new, annual, representative survey of Baltimore City and County residents being run by Johns Hopkins 21st Century Cities Initiative (21CC). The BAS will help scholars, community members, and policymakers learn more about the Baltimore area’s strengths and challenges from residents. 21CC affiliated researchers will partner with Baltimore community leaders and policy makers to identify pertinent topics to study and then field a survey with questions on those topics to a representative address-based sample of Baltimore City and Baltimore County residents every year. Having the survey in the field on an annual basis means that policy makers and community leaders are never more than a year away from asking important questions and having timely data. The survey will also allow for measuring change over time and looking at perceptions and opinions before and after significant events.

Topics and Collaboration

The best science comes from urban research grounded in the communities of Baltimore as part of a cooperative program that involves residents, leaders, and institutions with deep roots in the area. Community members are not subjects to be studied, but are instead collaborators who contribute their expertise and knowledge to the scientific enterprise. The topics of the BAS will be set by a combination of 21CC affiliated researchers, a Community Collaboration Committee (CCC), and external collaborators and partners including local governments and NGOs. Every year, we will work with the CCC to identify topics in need of investigation to understand the city, its surroundings, and its people. The CCC comprises leaders from community organizations, nonprofits, businesses, and local government staff. They are full partners that help to define the topics and work with faculty and graduate students to investigate those topics using the best practices of survey research, and, after the data are collected, help to craft the research briefs that we disseminate to the public and to policymakers.

Results and Findings

Open Data

Response data collected by the Baltimore Area Survey will be open and publicly available, while protecting individual’s identities by aggregating individual responses to the neighborhood level. These representative data will serve as a novel source of social science data that can be layered onto existing datasets such as BNIA’s annual community indicators and Open Baltimore datasets. Questions asked across multiple years will allow for the creation of representative data at the neighborhood level, similar to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

View the documentation and data for the 2023 survey.

Email us at [email protected] with any questions about the Baltimore Area Survey.