Introduction

The Delta Residents Survey (DRS) was a community survey conducted in the first quarter of 2023, reaching over 2,300 Delta and Delta-adjacent residents of the California Delta. The DRS had four substantive research aims:

  1. Characterize residents’ sense of place;
  2. Assess well-being of a diverse and evolving population living in the region;
  3. Understand residents’ experiences and perceptions of environmental and climate changes across the estuary;
  4. Evaluate residents’ civic engagement and perceptions of governance in the region.

An initial analysis of the survey results are provided in the Summary Report (see below).

Summary Report

The summary report is temporarily available here, and will become available on the Delta Stewardship Council website in the future. A screen-reader friendly version will be uploaded as well. Additional materials will be posted as they become available. Please check back in early 2024.

You can also view the video, listen to the audio, or read the transcript of our report to the Delta Stewardship Council meeting on October 26, 2023. Look for Agenda item #10.

Package Repository

The package icon for R cdrs. The icon is a hexagonal shape like other R package icons. It has a black border, with a blue and green interior. The interior depicts text that reads 'cdrs' in courier font, the silhouette of two cedar trees, and a small grey polygon reminiscent of the California Delta boundary.

In order to facilitate other researchers to better utilize the DRS data, we are creating an R-language package, {cdrs}. While its still a work in progress, the core functions are already available. We hope with this package that data users will be able to create reproducible code. Visit the package repository and the documentation to learn more.

Data

The public data set is now available on openICPSR, a database of social, behavioral, and health sciences research data. The Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which serves as the URL for the data, is https://doi.org/10.3886/E195447V1.

To protect respondent privacy, certain geographic, demographic, and survey response variables belonging to the original dataset are restricted from general public dissemination. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a Data Sharing Agreement for the use of confidential data, submit a Data Request Form to the research team that specifies the reasons for their request, research questions, and specific variables they seek to use, and obtain IRB approval or notice of exemption for their research. To learn more, first review the Data Sharing Agreement available in project documents and then review available materials in the “Restricted Use Data Information” folder.

Quickstart

While there are several documents available on our project openICPSR page, the data itself are stored in the “DRS public data… .zip” compressed folder.

To load the data, follow the steps outlined in the {cdrs} documentation.

Contact

If you have questions, please contact any of the following project members. Please note that we have obfuscated the email address to reduce spam. A listing of domain names (ie. @example.com) is shown in a table that follows.

  • Annie Merritt, Delta Stewardship Council. Please contact them with the name annie.merritt at their council email address.

  • Dr. Jessica Rudnick. Please use the name jessica.rudnick15 at their non-institutional domain.

  • Kenji Tomari, UC Davis. Please contact them with the name ktomari at their academic institutional domain.

Institution Domains
UC Davis ucdavis.edu
Delta Stewardship Council deltacouncil.ca.gov
Unlisted gmail.com