Re: [RC] AERC Survey question on age requirements to ride - Merryben
You
can talk about how the BOD and the Junior Committee ignore the wishes of the
membership all you want, but here are the correct numbers. 570 members out
of a membership of about 6,000 said they wanted an age restriction. Out of
that number 188 said at least 8 years old and 165 said over 8 years old.
The rest said anywhere from 5 to 8. Only about 18% of the entire
membership even answered the question. And that is why the board and the
junior committee decided to leave it alone. There is no majority of
the AERC membership that wants to change the way things
are.
The survey was done in Nov of 2004. There were about 1550 total
responses to the survey. Of the 1550 - about 1080 answered the age
question. Of those 1080 - 53% said yes and 47% said no.
One
view of the response is that this means that a slim majority wants an age
restriction. Another view says that the other 470 who didn't answer
the question didn't care enough to answer and the percent of the responders
saying yes was 570/1550 or only 37% of the members taking the questionnaire
wanted an age restriction.
Given that the SE region regional organization
has a requirement - some members of the BoD guessed that the SE biased the
vote. I checked and the responders from the SE region had the same
small preference for an age limit that the whole country did. See
attached note. In addition - the number of SE region responders
matched their percentage of the membership - meaning that there no bias to
the results by this being a "hot button" for that region.
Here's the
actual numbers
61. Should the AERC have an age restriction for junior
riders? Number of Responses Response Ratio Yes 570 52.7% No 511
47.3% Total 1081 100%
Of the ones who said yes
62. If yes to
age restriction, what should it be? Number of Responses Response
Ratio 1.At least 5 years old 79 13.5% 2.At least 6 years old 59
10.1% 3.At least 7 years old 94 16.1% 4.At least 8 years old 188
32.1% 5.More than 8 years old 165 28.2% Total 585 100%
Here's part
of a post I made concerning the results of the question concerning
whether AERC should have an age
requirement.
Members
tended to answer the all the questions depending on whether it applied to
them or not. Interesting enough - the number of responses on the age
limit questions was about the same number that responded to the questions
about families so they may be the ones concerned.
As far as responses to
the question by region - 146 of the 1081 responses to the question came from
the SE region and of those 146 - 76 voted yes and 70 voted no.
This is
very much in line with what the total group of 1081 voted for - 52%. I
don't see any bias here by the SE toward age limits. The yes and no
were spread across all the regions very much as the distribution of the
membership by region answering the question. 13.6% of the members
responding to the whole survey were from the SE region. Of those voting
on the age question - 13.5% were from the SE region.
