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Research and Assessment Methods Flashcards

7 cards from real AICP practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.

Read the first 7 Research and Assessment Methods flashcards as text

  1. Which approach to community engagement in planning research is MOST consistent with Participatory Action Research (PAR)?

    Answer: Community members are co-researchers who help define questions, collect data, and act on findings

    PAR involves communities as active partners throughout the research process, from problem definition to data collection and action.

  2. A planner uses a five-point Likert scale to measure resident satisfaction. This type of data is BEST classified as:

    Answer: Ordinal

    Likert scale responses represent ranked categories with no true equal intervals between points, making them ordinal data.

  3. When evaluating an affordable housing program, a planner wants to establish a counterfactual. The BEST approach would be to:

    Answer: Compare outcomes for program participants against a matched comparison group that did not participate

    A matched comparison group approximates the counterfactual—what would have happened to participants without the program—enabling causal inference.

  4. In a multivariate regression model predicting median home values, a planner finds that R² = 0.82. This means:

    Answer: 82% of the variance in home values is explained by the independent variables in the model

    R² represents the proportion of variance in the dependent variable explained by all independent variables in the regression model.

  5. A planner conducts a focus group about park amenities with eight participants. The MAIN advantage of this method over individual interviews is:

    Answer: Group interaction can surface shared perspectives and spark ideas not captured individually

    Focus groups leverage group dynamics and interaction, allowing participants to build on each other's ideas and reveal collective perspectives.

  6. Which data source would a planner MOST likely use to identify patterns of residential segregation by race at the neighborhood level?

    Answer: Decennial Census or American Community Survey tract-level data

    The Decennial Census and ACS provide race and ethnicity data at the census tract level, the standard geography for neighborhood-level segregation analysis.

  7. A planner must assess traffic impacts for a mixed-use development proposal. Which document provides standardized trip generation rates most planners use as a starting point?

    Answer: ITE Trip Generation Manual

    The ITE Trip Generation Manual provides empirically derived trip generation rates for hundreds of land uses, serving as the standard reference for traffic impact studies.