Map meaningful places in your community

Everyone has a different experience with their environment—the landscape of places, resources, and people around you. How you interact with these places and the social ties you build with the people in them forms your community. Your community encompasses the area around you, where you live, how you get to school or work, where your family gets food, what activities and hobbies you participate in, and where you spend your free time. What places have meaning to you and why?

This is an especially important question as we consider how our world is changing. Disruptions to our daily lives like global pandemics or climate change elevate the importance of places like hospitals, food stores, and city buildings. But other public spaces are important too. A library can provide shelter from extreme heat or cold, places of worship can provide vital social services like a food pantry, and neighborhood landmarks provide a sense of identity and celebrate community milestones.

In this tutorial, you'll find the places most important to your community by surveying your classmates. You'll do the following:

• Define a research question
• Determine what and how much data you need to collect
• Create a survey to collect data
• Map and chart your collected data
• Interpret your findings and identify possible solutions

This tutorial focuses on the research process and how to craft meaningful questions. It can be used in two different ways: First, as a guide to thinking through a research topic, using a provided survey and dataset. Second, as a class project, where the class as a group identifies a research topic and relevant questions that are complied into a single survey. The class members then share the survey link with the intended audience to collect data, and later, to analyze it.

This tutorial was last tested on January 6, 2026.

View final result

Requirements

• ArcGIS organizational account with a Publisher, Facilitator, or Administrator role (see options for software access or learn about free ArcGIS education licensing for K-12 instructional use)

Map meaningful places in your community

Design your project

Before you start finding places, you'll need to plan your project, defining what you want to learn and how. This process is called project design. There are three main steps to project design:

• Formulate a research question.
• Decide what data to collect and how much you'll need.
• Write survey questions to collect the data.

Data collection needs to be done in the context of your project and with a purpose. To start, you'll formulate a research question that summarizes this purpose. Your research question should address the following: Why are you collecting data? What do you want to know?

1. Write a research question to guide your project about important places in your community.

   For example: What places in my community have social, economic, and political value and add to my community's identity?

   A simpler example might be: What places in my community contribute to its identity?

   Now that you have your research question, you'll think about the kinds of data you need for your project. What do you need to answer your research question? In this stage of the project design, you'll plan out all the questions you'll need to ask to gather your data. Consider who, what, when, where, and why.

2. Write five sample questions you can use to collect data to answer your research question.

   The following list includes several example questions:

   • What is the name of this place?
   • Why is it important to you?
   • What activities do you do at this place?
   • How often do you visit here?
   • Who is there with you?
   • How many people are typically there with you?

   Next, you'll focus on the data types.

   Depending on how you want to use the data after it's collected, you can choose to use formats such as numbers, text, dates, rating scales, images, or others. Each of these allow you to interact with the data in different ways. For example, the name of the place needs to be stored in a string field, or a text field. But if you want to count how many times you visit that place each week, that should be stored as a number.

   As you write your questions, think about the type of data each should be. Writing questions that allow you to collect data in as close to its intended form as possible will save you from having to change the data later.

3. Write 5-8 survey questions, keeping in mind your research question and the types of data you want to collect about each location.

   The following table contains sample questions that you are free to adapt to your own project design. The sample survey provided with this tutorial includes all but the first and last of these questions.

   Question	Options	Data type
   What is this name of this place?		Text
   Where is this place?		Map
   What kind of place is this?	School Neighborhood Park or open space Library Market Shopping center Religious space Community center Memorial or historic site Restaurant Performing Arts space Other community space	Single select
   How do you interact with this space?	To spend time with family To spend time with friends To exercise For recreation To shop To learn To worship Other	Multiple select
   How important is this place to you?		Rating
   How many times per week do you visit this place?		Number
   What kinds of challenges might this place face?	Climate threats and adaptability Funding challenges Land use change and development None	Multiple select
   Upload a photo of this location		Image

   Finally, you'll consider how many responses are needed to answer the research question. If everyone in your class contributes one location, is that enough data? How many different perspectives do you need?

4. Decide how many data points you need to collect and from how many different people.

   As you decide how much data you need and who you need to ask, make sure to consider data bias. Data bias is when the data doesn't represent the population accurately.

   For example, if you've surveyed just your class of seventh graders, your data will tell you what kinds of places in your town may be important to seventh graders, but it may not tell you what places are important to eighth graders or adults.

   Depending on the types of data you're collecting, and the scale of the conclusions you want to draw, you must be aware of data bias. When sharing what you've found, you'll want to state who provided the data and how you collected it.

5. Set a goal as a class for how many data points you need to collect and how many people you should survey.

Create the survey

Next, you'll use ArcGIS Survey123 to turn your questions into a survey.

Note:

If you don't want to build your own survey and collect data, you can fill out the sample survey, then skip to the Analyze data section and use the sample survey dataset provided for this tutorial.

1. Go to the ArcGIS Survey123 website and sign in with your ArcGIS organizational account.

   Note:

   If you don't have an organizational account, see options for software access.

2. Click New survey.

   

3. For Blank survey, click Get started.

   

   A new survey is created. Before you start adding questions, you'll name the survey and add information for people taking the survey.

4. On the ribbon, click the Edit survey info button.

   

   The Edit survey info window appears.

5. For Name, delete Untitled survey and type Places of importance.
6. Click OK.

   To make sure anyone taking the survey knows what they're answering questions about, you'll set the survey title and description.

7. At the top of the survey, click Survey title not set.

   

   The Survey header pane appears.

8. In the Survey header pane, for Text, delete the existing text and type Places of importance in our community.

   

9. In the survey, click Description content for the survey.

   

10. In the Survey description pane, delete the existing text. Type (or copy and paste) the following text:

    What places in the community have social, economic, or political value and add to my community's resilience?

Add questions to the survey

Now that your survey introduction is set, you'll start adding questions. The Add pane lists the different types of questions you can add to the survey. There are often many ways to collect similar kinds of data. For example, both the Likert scale and the Rating question types collect data that captures a score, like four out of five stars. Likert scales are more flexible, though, and you can replace stars with text, such as a scale of Not very much to Very much.

Because questions may vary between data collection projects, you'll build the first two sample questions in this section and add additional questions as needed.

1. In the Add pane, click the Singleline text question type.

   

   A blank question is added to your survey and the Edit tab opens.

2. In the Singleline text pane, for Label, type (or copy and paste) What is the name of this place?

   

   The question updates on the survey to show the label you added. There are several other options you can set for the question. For example, you can choose to give a hint for how someone might answer the question. You can also decide if you need the survey taker to answer this question. Ask: is it worth the respondent submitting the survey if they don't answer this question? If not, make the question required.

3. For Validation, check the box for This is a required question.

   

   In the survey pane, a red asterisk after the question text indicates that the question is required.

   After asking the name of the place, the next relevant question is to ask where it's located. For this, you'll add a map question. This question will collect the geographic location of the data point.

4. In the Add pane, click the Map question type.

   

   The Map pane appears.

   First, you'll give the question a name (label) and give survey takers a hint for how they might answer the question. When collecting data, it is important to discuss privacy needs and requirements. If you're collecting potentially sensitive data, including names, home addresses, and any other personally identifying information, you should have an idea of where that data's going to be stored, who'll be able to see it, and how it will be used.

5. For Label, type (or copy and paste) Where is this place?
6. For Hint, type (or copy and paste) Keep in mind with maps that some information is personal: you probably shouldn't share your home's location nor other personal locations. But you can safely share locations like your city or a major intersection.

   

   Next, you'll choose the type of geographic data you want to collect—a point, line, or polygon. You can also choose to ask your survey participants to share their current location or draw their data on the map. To make it a bit easier for your survey participants to start in your community, you'll set the default location to your school.

7. For Drawing tools, make sure Point is chosen.
8. For Map and extent, type the address of your school and press Enter, or zoom and pan until you find your campus.

   Note:

   The sample survey default location is the Esri campus in Redlands, California (380 New York St, Redlands, CA, 92373, USA).

   

9. For Default location, choose Center of the map extent specified above.

   

   Finally, you'll decide if you need the survey taker to answer this question. Since location is key to your research question, you'll make the map question required.

10. For Validation, check the box for This is a required question.

    The question is configured.

    

11. Using the Add pane, and add the rest of the questions you've formulated. Test various question types to see what will get you the best survey results.
12. When you're finished adding your questions, on the ribbon, click the Save button.

    

    You're ready to publish the survey.

    Note:

    If you don't want to publish the survey, you can instead take a sample survey. This survey includes all sample questions in the table above except the place name and the option to upload a photo. These are not included to protect minors' privacy.

13. Click Publish. In the Publish Survey pane, click Publish.

    The survey may take a few minutes to publish.

Collect data

Now that you've built and published your survey, you're ready to collect your data. Once you've collected enough data, you can map the results and draw conclusions.

1. On the ribbon, click Collaborate.

   

2. For Who can submit to this survey, check the box Everyone (public).

   

   Note:

   Depending on your organization's privacy settings and your account permissions, you may only be able to share it with your organization. If that's the case, you can share with your organization instead of with everyone.

3. At the bottom of the page, click Save.
4. For Share this survey, copy and share the link.

   

5. Have your classmates fill out and submit the survey.

   As you collect data, keep in mind the question you thought about earlier: how much data is enough?

Analyze data

Once you've collected your data, you can analyze it. There are several questions to ask as you're analyzing your data: how many people have taken your survey? Is there any possible bias in the data? Are there any answers that surprise you? Remember, you can go back and collect more data at any time.

Note:

If you chose not to create a survey, you won't be able to see the map view on the Data tab. After reviewing steps 1 through 6, you can rejoin the tutorial at step 7 to analyze the data using a sample dataset.

1. On the ribbon, click the Data tab.

   

   The Data tab shows two main components: a map of the data points you've collected and an attribute table. An attribute table is a table that organizes all the data about each point.

2. Click a point on the map.

   The corresponding record in the attribute table is highlighted in blue.

   Note:

   The example images show responses to an example survey. Your map and responses will look different.

   

   First, you want to understand the distribution of the data. Are your points spread across the map, or are there a lot of points stacked on top of each other? To answer this question, you'll use heat map symbology. A heat map uses colors to show where there's a lot of data.

3. Above the map, click Open in Map Viewer.

   

   A map window appears within the Survey123 browser.

   

   The data currently appears as points representing the location of the data.

4. On the Settings (light) toolbar, click the Styles button.

   

   The Styles pane appears. In this pane, you can specify the style to use to display the data points.

5. Under Pick a style, click Heat map.

   

6. At the bottom of the pane, click Done.
7. If necessary, on the map, zoom in to your school.

   The map now shows a range of colors from blue to yellow. Areas in yellow show where there's a lot of data, and areas in blue show where there's not a lot of data.

   

   What does your class's heat map look like? Does it look like a lot of students think the same places are important? Or are there many different places that are important to students?

   Next, you'll look at how each question was answered.

8. Close the Map Viewer window. On the ribbon, click the Analyze tab.

   

   Note:

   If you did not create a survey, you can open the example results to analyze its responses.

   The Analyze tab shows how each question was answered. Depending on the questions your class asked, the analysis will look different.

   

   What similarities do you notice about your class's answers? What differences?

   You've gone through all the steps of data collection. To decide if your project is complete, you'll go back to the research question: what places in my community have social, economic, and political value and add to my community's identity?

   Does your data answer this question?

   If your answer is yes, you have successfully met your project design goal and your project is complete. If not, consider which step you need to return to and adjust. The data collection process is iterative, meaning that at any point you and your class can go back and collect more data or add new questions to the survey to better answer your research question.

In this tutorial, you developed a project design, determined a research question to collect data about places of importance in your community. You learned how to create a survey to collect relevant data and analyze it. This process can be applied to any research question, so you can complete this workflow with a new research question that is important to you and your community.

You can find more tutorials in the tutorial gallery.

Acknowledgements

• Card and banner image by Tnarg from Pexels.
• Topographic map sources: Esri, TomTom, Garmin, FAO, NOAA, USGS, OpenStreetMap contributors, and the GIS User Community