Subcommittee reports nearly 600 tenant responses; Ohio University students to help analyze rental-inspection survey

The rental-inspection subcommittee chair (identified in the transcript as S2) told the commission that the subcommittee has collected close to 600 tenant survey responses and 233 landlord/property-manager responses via Qualtrics. The chair said the landlord responses represent roughly one-third of local landlords — a response rate the subcommittee described as "quite frankly, pretty impressive."

To analyze the data, the subcommittee secured help from Ohio University: a communications doctoral student (named in the transcript as Erica Adam Adzemal) will clean the data and produce a summer project report, supervised by Dr. Ben Bates, associate professor. The cleaned dataset will then be used in the fall by Dr. Charlie Morgan's undergraduate research methods course and by a master’s-level statistics instructor who also expressed interest in using the dataset for class projects. The chair said the research work will include qualitative and quantitative analysis and that no identifying information will be shown outside the research team.

The committee expects cleaned data to be available after August and said it will report key findings when student analysis is complete. Members also discussed CitizensServe capacity for inspection records and coordination with university researchers to maximize analytic value.