The Illinois State Water Survey and Illinois Water Resources Center at the University of Illinois are working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to determine best practices for conducting outreach to private well owners to increase their willingness to test their well water and protect their health. We’re conducting an assessment of well owner outreach programs like yours to determine how others have engaged well owners and what approaches are most successful at increasing well owner participation in outreach and sampling events. We will use this information to identify a suite of community engagement best practices that you and other environmental health staff at state, local, and tribal environmental health and agricultural departments who are government employees and who conduct outreach to private well owners can use.
We would love to learn more about your well owner outreach program and we have set up an objective online data collection instrument to look statistically at factors that might influence well owner participation, as well as a few narrative questions to gather information based on your experiences in working with well owners. We’re using an online service called Survey Monkey to collect your responses and aggregate them with other participants. The instrument asks 25 questions, both multiple choice and open-ended, and will take approximately 18 minutes to complete. We hope to gather data from 100 well owner outreach programs from around the country. We would also like to compile information from the participating departments in an appendix so that others can compare similarities and differences between past efforts. (Please note that all personal identifiable information will be kept secure.) We believe it will help educate future, similar efforts to be more successful. One of the online questions asks your permission to list your individual responses.
If you are willing to participate, we can e-mail you the data collection instrument instructions and link. Please just respond to this email, and we will add you to the assessment. You should receive an email within a week that has a unique link for you to use to complete the questions online.
The email will have additional instructions, but if you have further questions, please contact Steve Wilson at [email protected] or 217-333-0956. We look forward to hearing from you and look forward to working with you on this important project.
Sincerely,
Steve Wilson
Groundwater Hydrologist and Manager, PrivateWellClass.org
Illinois State Water Survey
University of Illinois
Phone: 217-333-0956
Email: [email protected]
| File Type | application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document |
| Author | Steve Wilson |
| File Modified | 0000-00-00 |
| File Created | 2021-01-28 |