Ontology: Customer Survey Responses from El Pueblo visitors

I chose to examine the data set of survey responses from El Pueblo visitors. El Pueblo is a historical monument in Los Angeles that additionally hosts free concerts and cultural festivals over the course of the year. Each entry is averaged from at least 75 surveys each month. The dataset’s content types are the Month, and then each of the survey questions: Knew that El Pueblo Offers Free Tours, Local Residents, Out of State Visitors, International Visitors, Visited a Restaurant, Purchased an Item on Olvera St., Visited a Museum, Came fora Specific Event/Exhibit, Arrived on Bus/Charter Tour, Arrived by Public Transit, Enjoyed the Visit, and lastly, Would Recommend El Pueblo to a Friend. Each of these columns contain a percentage of how many survey respondents responded with a “yes.” For example, the entry for 08/01/2014 for “Local Residents” is 49%, which indicates that 49% of visitors who responded to the survey were from the local area.

This data is incredibly important to those who work at El Pueblo so that they can see what are the most popular interests to visitors so that they can allocate their venue’s time properly in a way that would benefit the most visitors. Additionally, they can notice that they may need to make their resources, such as free tours, more known. They can see which months may have higher international visitors and therefore know when they may need to offer tours in multiple languages.

It would be interesting to see visualization of this data over time so that we could see how visitors have changed their visiting behavior. At a glance, it seems like over the past three years, more and more visitors visit the museum, and more people consistently enjoyed their visit and would recommend to a friend as time goes on.

I find it odd that the survey simply asks if visitors “enjoyed the visit.” I think a better question would ask to rate their visit on a scale. It is hard to answer a yes/no question because it is hard to say that you did not enjoy the visit at all, so I believe a better gauge that would be more helpful to El Pueblo employees would be a scale system. Additionally, a “how did you hear about us?” question might help El Pueblo understand where to focus their efforts in terms of publicity. Another potential source of information that is missing is a question that would ask how much time a visitor spent at the museum.

If I were to redo this data collection, I would focus much more on the quality of different aspects of the visit so that we can make improvements. Especially given this current data set, we can consider the trends of local vs out of state vs international visitors as fairly consistent, and we don’t need to keep asking those questions. Similarly, transportation questions such as if the visitor used a bus/charter tour vs public transit. This doesn’t seem particularly interesting, and it leaves out Ubers since the survey hasn’t been adapted in three years.

One comment

  1. Hello,
    I appreciate how you gave a full description of the many categories that the data was broken down in to and how this data plays a key role in the viability of the park throughout the years. I especially appreciated how you were critical with some of the questions being asked on the survey, and how you gave reasonable suggestions on how such survey questions could be improved. I personally think that information on where visitors are from is still important to understanding the demographics of the park, but I understand where you are coming from; especially since the data has been stagnant for quite some time. Great job!

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