Needs Assessment: A Systematic Approach to Data Collection provides guidance for collecting citizen input, primarily in recreation services.

This book offers key objectives in citizen data collection, and methods of collecting input. It also discusses focus group meetings, questionnaires, and data collection. Further, it offers information about data analysis and data utilization, as well as study management, outsourcing, and special applications.

In addition to experience in higher education, the author has worked with nearly 170 recreation agencies across the United States in his almost 25 years of doing recreation research and is the owner of the recreation research company Management Learning Laboratories.

For the recreation practitioner, this book shows the best practices of collecting citizen data. It also allows the recreation professional to recognize the unscientific attempts at citizen data collection and be wary of information generated by less reliable methods.