Week 7 capstone assignment

Capstone Project Part II: Needs Assessment

Arroxxiccia Thomas

Walden University

Capstone Project Part II: Needs Assessment

There is absolutely no doubt that each community is faced with a number of gaps in terms of needs that are supposed to be met. For instance, with regards to the Mumbai city dwellers, there are several gaps that must be identified by using a needs assessment tool. It is therefore important to understand that needs assessment is carried out in order to identify what is lacking in the community or what has not been met (Mulliner, Malys & Maliene, 2016). Equally, needs assessments are carried out with the objective of determining the gap between the current condition and the desired condition. Therefore, with regards to the Community urban community in Mumbai city, there are several steps that will be considered when conducting a needs assessment. These include:

Step I

Brainstorming and planning: This involves gathering a team of experts or stakeholders that will constitute the needs assessment task force. The task force should include the people in leadership, service delivery staff, and the customers.

Step II

Preparing a guiding document. This is achieved by gathering information from the task force and carefully analyzing it in order to prepare a document that would be used throughout the needs assessment assignment.

Step III

This step involves collecting the secondary data by finding the relevant information from the required sources. This is useful in supporting the questions that one asks in the survey.

Step IV

The fourth step is the primary data collection where qualitative and quantitative data is collected from the people to be served. This data is collected in form of electronic surveys or moderated focus groups.

Step V

The fifth step is data analysis where once data is available; it becomes necessary to analyze the results in qualitative and quantitative forms. This is followed by writing up the results and putting them in graphics.

Step VI

The final step is publishing the results to advocate for new policies or improving community understanding.

When conducting a needs assessment regarding the housing problem in Mumbai city, the key stakeholders to be conducted include the consumers or the recipient of the survey because they are the one who feels the gap and therefore would shed more light on what needs to be done. The other stakeholders are the administrators and the leaders to give information on how they plan to roll out the project in order to address the gap identified (Jana, Bardhan, Sarkar & Kumar, 2016). This is followed by developing a list of survey questions that will include:

Duration

When did the housing problem begin?

How long did it take to become a societal issue?

How long has the effect last?

Scope

How many people have been affected so far?

Is there any likelihood of more people getting affected?

Severity

How seriously are the people affected?

Which areas are the worst affected?

How have people built their resiliency towards the problem?

Are there other problems that have been caused by the severity of this problem?

Perception

What is the general feeling of the people regarding the problem?

All the questions are developed based on how the community has been affected and what they feel should be done to address the problem. Elsewhere, the reasoning behind the questions on the survey list is that the problem has been around for sometimes and therefore it cannot be solved without having an insight into the problem itself. The items on the list are varied based on the role of the recipient by looking at the duration of the problem, the scope, the severity and the perception of the public about the problem.

Reference:

Jana, A., Bardhan, R., Sarkar, S., & Kumar, V. (2016). Framework to assess and locate affordable and accessible housing for developing nations: Empirical evidence from Mumbai. Habitat International, 57, 88-99.

Mulliner, E., Malys, N., & Maliene, V. (2016). Comparative analysis of MCDM methods for the assessment of sustainable housing affordability. Omega, 59, 146-156.