THE FIGURES BEHIND THE FIGURES

In preparing an Appraisal Questionnaire, one has to tread a very fine line between asking all the questions to which one would like the answers to obtain a worthwhile picture and not imposing too large a burden on people completing it.� After considerable discussion, the final Questionnaire contained 171 slots or boxes for answers.� In the 165 completed replies there were, therefore, over 28,000 potential answers on 1,155 pages of Questionnaires.� Many of the questions required 'Yes or No' answers, but there were still a possible 15,000 answers to be extracted and collated.

Some intrepid Village Appraisal conductors have completed this process manually and one hesitates to consider their state of mind after completing it!� Fortunately, with help from a number of people, a computer programme was prepared and the results were condensed onto 69 A4 size pages.� For computer buffs, this was carried out on Lotus Approach, the 165 records were summarised on 9 Summary Reports of the statistics containing a total of 501 fields and 11 Columnar Reports containing over 60 pages of comments.