Good Life Camden
Question Bank
April 2025
Questions for your survey or evaluation
What is this guide and who is it for
This guide is an introduction and manual for using the Good Life Camden Question Bank.
It includes information on the Good Life Camden Framework, Using the Question Bank, Putting your Survey Together, and Analysing your Findings.
You’ll find this guide useful if you:
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Where to find the Question Bank
(and other resources)
Good Life Camden Framework
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What is Good Life Camden?
The Good Life Camden framework was co-produced
with residents who told us what matters the most to them.
It breaks down the concept of living a good life into 9 themes
and helps us to focus our work to have the greatest impact.
The signals help us measure the progress we’re making �in each theme.
Data on Good Life Camden outcomes forms a part of how we
understand the State of the Borough and how specific missions and
challenges are having an impact on people’s lives.
Good Life Camden has also helped us to identify important areas where we are missing data. One of the ways we are looking to fill those data gaps is through this question bank.
Gathering data to understand our impact
Everyone has a piece of the puzzle of how Good Life Camden is going. The data from your surveys can be fed into the Camden insights team to help create a rich picture of the State of the Borough.
Different types of data are used to understand our progress, for example:
Theme | Signal | Measure | Data source |
Health | People live long and healthy lives | Healthy life expectancy | Office for National Statistics |
Satisfaction with your health | Good Life Camden Question Bank |
In practice: Waste Service Resident Survey
In the waste service resident survey we included three questions which aligned to Good Life Camden including satisfaction with their local area and how safe people felt in their local area both during the day and at night.
We chose these questions as they are important outcomes related to how people experience living in a local area.
We do not have data for Camden for these questions and thought there might be a relationship between how
people feel about their local area and their perceptions regarding waste services.
We found that people who felt less safe also reported graffiti in their neighbourhood - a correlation. This doesn’t mean that one causes the other, but correlations can help us identify and predict trends, and to test possible solutions. An outcome of this process was significant street cleaning services.
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Using the Question Bank
What is the GLC Question Bank?
The GLC Question Bank is a set of questions that correspond to Good Life Camden themes and signals.
The questions can be used:
The questions can be used as part of project evaluations, or to monitor changes in an area or population. They are suitable for a range of sectors and services.
The Question Bank is structured around the GLC themes, and includes all the information you might need to use each question.
The GLC theme it belongs to
What’s included for each question
Exact wording and response options
Preamble and placement advice
Where to find data for benchmarking
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How did we choose these questions?
The questions can be used across a wide range of services and contexts, and they do not require specialist knowledge to use.
We prioritised including questions that:
NOTE: It’s important to keep the wording of the questions and the response options exactly the same, so we can compare the data and benchmark against these national databases.
Why else should you use these questions?
Most of the questions are used or accepted by a range of �charity funders or umbrella bodies, for example:
Asking these questions in a survey
In order to ensure these questions generate good data, it’s important to:
An example of a preamble is:
“I will now ask some questions about the services and facilities in your local area. By local services and facilities, I mean things like shops, restaurants, parks, sports centres, schools and GP surgeries.”
How the questions may look in your questionnaire
| | Not at all | Completely | |||||||||
Q1 | How satisfied are you with your life nowadays? | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
Q2 | How happy did you feel yesterday? | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
Q3 | To what extent do you feel the things you do in life are worthwhile? | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
Q4 | How anxious did you feel yesterday? | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
Section one: Your wellbeing
The following are some questions about how you feel on different aspects of your life. There are no right or wrong answers. We ask these questions to find out about the general wellbeing of the people using these services.
Note: If you’re interviewing someone you would say: “On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is ‘not at all’ and 10 is ‘completely’, overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?”
The themes and questions
The following slides show the GLC themes with some examples of the questions that are included in the Question Bank.
Good life
Measures how people feel about their lives and their local area.
It includes our priority question which we hope is included in as many surveys as possible:
Personal wellbeing: Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
Some other questions in this theme are:
Satisfaction with local area: Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your local area as a place to live?
Local area improvement: Do you think that over the past two years your area has got better/worse to live in?
Health
A core theme that measures people’s feelings about their health and their habits:
Some of the questions in this theme are:
General health satisfaction: How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your health in general?
Healthy eating: How many portions of fruit and
vegetables did you eat yesterday?
Exercise: In the past week, on how many days have you done a total of 30 mins or more of physical activity, which was enough to raise your breathing rate?
Equality
A core theme which measures whether people feel included and represented, and whether they are able to access the services they need:
Some of the questions in this theme are:
Access to services:
How satisfied or dissatisfied are you that good services and facilities are available in your local area?
How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your ability to access these services and facilities?
How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with how these services and facilities meet your needs?
Safety
A core theme that measures people’s experience of crime and sense of safety:
Some of the questions in this theme are:
Feeling safe during the day: How safe or unsafe do you feel during the day when outside in your local area?
Feeling safe after dark: How safe or unsafe do you feel after dark when outside in your local area?
Online crime: Have you personally experienced any of the following [online crime or bullying] in the past 12
months?
Environment
This measures people's feelings about natural spaces and whether their behaviour helps protect the environment:
Some of the questions in this theme are:
Satisfaction with green spaces: How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the green and natural spaces in your local area?
Use of clean transport: How often do you cycle to and from work?
New green habits: To what extent have you made changes, if any, to your lifestyle to help tackle climate change?
Lifelong learning
This measures people’s feelings and experiences of learning and skills:
Some of the questions in this theme are:
Recent learning: In the last three months, have you taken part in any learning, education or training either for work or for yourself?
Satisfaction with skills and education: How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your education and skills?
Housing
This measures people's feelings about their accommodation.
The question for this theme is:
Satisfaction with accommodation: How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your accommodation?
Income and affordability
This measures people’s feelings about their financial wellbeing:
The question for this theme is:
Managing financially: To what extent do you agree or disagree that you have found it difficult to manage financially in the past month?
Social Connections and Community
This measures people's feelings about their relationships and communities, and their social behaviour.
Some of the questions in this theme are:
Belonging: To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement 'I feel like I belong in my neighbourhood'
Cohesion: To what extent do you agree or disagree that your local area is a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together?
Loneliness: �How often do you feel you have no one to talk to?
How often do you feel left out?
How often do you feel alone?
How often do you feel lonely?
Empowered Citizenship
This measures people feel they can influence decisions, and how they act to make change happen in communities:
Some of the questions in this theme are:
Say in decision making: To what extent do you agree or disagree that you personally can influence decisions affecting your local area?
People pull together: To what extent do you agree or disagree that people in your neighbourhood pull together to improve the local area?
Volunteering: Over the last 12 months, have you given any unpaid help to clubs, groups, charities or organisations?
Putting your survey together
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How to select the right questions for your survey
Priority question:
On a scale of 0 to 10 where 0 is “not at all” and 10 is “completely”
Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
Qualitative questions
You may want to give people opportunities to tell you their opinion or experience in their own words. This could be by using open text questions in your survey, or by carrying out follow up interviews or focus groups.
Every piece of qualitative data will be unique, so you won’t be able to compare them to each other directly like the quantitative data from Question Bank questions. Make sure you have enough time to develop and analyse this kind of data.
However, you can still analyse a set of responses and narratives together to find themes and patterns.
Examples of qualitative survey questions:
Examples of qualitative data
I feel like I am highly satisfied with my life at the moment since moving to Camden due to its centrality, diversity and rich artistic culture/ history which I often find find me with my university course.
I am adversely affected by living and walking around Camden. Polluted roads, lack of trees in Camden High Street. Heavily polluted.
Yes, I have connected to new people. They are telling my about new jobs. I meet them in community centres and in the mosque.
Here are some of the responses to qualitative questions from recent surveys:
Ethical, inclusive and open
Good Life Camden is a framework by local people for local people. The data should be collected and used in a way that reflects this:
Here’s an example of a consent statement for your survey:
"By completing this questionnaire, you consent to [organisation] collecting and using your responses to [e.g. understand and improve our service]. Our findings from this survey will be reported in [e.g. our public impact report, funding applications, internal reports]. Your answers will remain confidential and will be used in accordance with data protection laws and our privacy policy [insert link]. You don’t have to answer any question if you don’t want to."
NOTE that if you are asking for information which identifies people (like names, addresses), or if you are sharing the data with another organisation, you will need more explicit consent.
Supporting people to take part
You should consider who will be completing your questionnaire and how you can make sure as many of them do so. For example, an online questionnaire might be harder for people who aren’t confident in doing things online.
Some people may find it harder to answer some of these questions than others, for example when English is an additional language, or if they have learning disabilities. If this is the case they may need support in completing the questionnaire. Get in touch with us if you’d like more guidance on this.
Taking part in a questionnaire should be entirely voluntary, and shouldn’t determine someone’s access to a service or activity. People should be able to skip any question they don’t want to answer.
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Analysing your findings
Tips to make sense of your results
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Look for patterns between questions. Are some responses correlated to others?
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Compare your results to those for the whole of Camden, or to rational or national data. How are your respondents doing compared to this?
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Look for changing trends by comparing to previous surveys. Are some indicators getting better or worse? What could explain these changes?
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Look at the response averages and proportions. Are some people more or less likely to feel a certain way?
Add your data to our knowledge of the borough
Once you have analysed the data from your survey you can send the results to us at GoodLifeCamden@camden.gov.uk
We will review this information and look to include it in the annual State of the Borough Report.
We can also see how this data can help drive service improvements and ensure that our services are designed to make the greatest impact on local people.
Contact
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