As a survey researcher, I’m used to designing questions that capture broad patterns across populations. But our recent study of school transportation challenges faced by parents and administrators reminded me why some research problems are more complex to measure systematically.

The questions we wanted to ask parents of K-12 students seem straightforward enough: How does your child get to school? Why doesn’t your child ride the school bus? But when we sat down to write the survey, the complexity became apparent. Maybe you live too close or too far from school to ride the bus. Maybe the bus will come to your house, but you don’t think it’s safe. Maybe the bus schedule doesn’t work with your schedule. Maybe the timing is wrong, or the routes have been cut, or you’ve heard concerning things about student behavior on buses.

We discussed this challenge extensively during our project with HopSkipDrive, a technology company focused on school transportation issues. The project required two different survey approaches: we used NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak® Panel to survey parents and separately surveyed school administrators using marketing databases and a nonprobability panel sample.

For parents, each family’s situation involves a unique combination of geographic, economic, logistical, and safety considerations that can’t easily be reduced to simple response options. To balance comprehensiveness with clarity, specificity, and generalizability, we needed questions detailed enough to capture meaningful variation while remaining answerable by respondents with vastly different realities. Our solution involved carefully designing questions and developing extensive response options.

Combining the parents’ survey with findings from our survey of school administrators proved valuable precisely because transportation issues look different from different vantage points. In our survey, school administrator respondents saw systemwide resource constraints and operational challenges, while parents experienced daily logistics issues and trade-offs. Neither perspective alone would have captured the full scope of the problem.

Despite these complexities, some findings emerged with striking clarity. Both administrator respondents (81 percent) and parents (70 percent) reported that traffic congestion during school drop-off and pickup creates problems. This consistency across vastly different communities suggests that individual transportation decisions can add up to shared community challenges.

Complex social problems require thoughtful survey design that acknowledges real-world variation while maintaining analytical rigor. The individualized nature of transportation challenges didn’t prevent us from identifying systematic patterns. It just required more careful attention to question development and sample design.

Working with subject matter experts proved essential for navigating these complexities. HopSkipDrive’s industry knowledge helped us anticipate the range of transportation scenarios families navigate. At the same time, NORC’s methodological expertise and AP’s journalism perspective ensured we could translate those insights into reliable data that reached decision-makers.

The methodological lessons from this study extend beyond survey design. Policymakers addressing transportation challenges face the same complexity we encountered in our questions. Our findings suggest school transportation solutions need flexibility to address varied geographic, economic, and logistical realities while maintaining systematic approaches to resource allocation and service delivery.

We found that despite individual variation in transportation circumstances, shared problems seem to exist at the community level. This creates opportunities for targeted interventions that acknowledge local complexity while addressing common challenges like traffic congestion and resource constraints.