Overview
The Tampa Bay Community Survey (TBCS) was launched in 2024 to collect long-term social and behavioral data that can inform our progress in achieving community goals described in TBEP’s Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan for Tampa Bay. Designed to run every two years, the TBCS is our primary instrument for monitoring cultural changes within the diverse communities that call Tampa Bay home. The TBCS complements our long-established ecological indicators of the state of the bay by providing new social indicators that can assist us in evaluating the health and resiliency of Tampa Bay amidst environmental and societal change.
The inaugural 2024 TBCS includes data from over 1,200 residents across parts of Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, and Polk Counties, and is representative to two different audiences: the general public and people within TBEP’s existing communication and outreach networks. The data captures a variety of community characteristics, including residents’ knowledge about the state of the bay, engagement in nature-related activities and environmental behaviors, priorities for their local community, perceptions and experiences of nature and environmental change, and their overall mental health and wellbeing. This data has a wide variety of potential applications for researchers, practitioners, planners, and communications and outreach coordinators throughout the Tampa Bay area.
The 2024 Tampa Bay Community Survey Technical Report presents an overview of the responses collected from the first wave of the TBCS. The results highlighted in the report are descriptive in nature to showcase general patterns observed between the public and in-network audiences. The report also contains a summary of the survey design and distribution methods, including two appendices that contain a copy of the paper version of the survey and a data dictionary that provides readers with a description of the datasets available for download in the public TBCS Github Repository. We encourage others to utilize current and future TBCS data to further explore these community characteristics to uncover new trends and insights that can help us better understand how we can cultivate an informed, engaged, and responsible community in Tampa Bay.
Download the 2024 Tampa Bay Community Survey Report (top) for information about the survey materials, results, and data available for public use. A two-page Report Summary (bottom) is also available that highlights key findings from the report.
Coming soon
Users will soon be able to explore the results of the 2024 TBCS in an upcoming immersive and interactive TBCS Shiny Dashboard. If you’d like to stay up-to-date on all TBCS publications and data products, sign up to the TBEP Social Science Subcommittee email list.
