Analyzing Community Needs in the City of Urdaneta

Using Text Analytics

CHRISTINE LOURRINE S. TABLATIN, MICHAEL E. ACOSTA, FREDERICK F. PATACSIL

College of Computing, Pangasinan State University,

Urdaneta City, Pangasinan,

PHILIPPINES

Abstract: - Community needs assessments are one of the functions of city managers/administrators to find ways

to collect accurate data/information that represent the most important needs of a community. In such

assessments, a commitment to community participation is very important to determine current situations and

identify issues for action, establishing the essential foundation for vital planning. That’s where a community

needs assessment comes in; it can be used to inform and improve any community development initiative. The

main objective of this study is to conduct a needs assessment focusing primarily on identifying

community needs in the City of Urdaneta. This study utilized a mixed method whereby data were collected and

analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively to analyze the community needs of the City of Urdaneta.

The quantitative data were used to describe the population that resides in the city, and they were the

respondents to the study. This method was utilized to obtain a direct picture of the services that the City of

Urdaneta is providing to its stakeholders and provide a better understanding and explanation of their needs. The

result reveals that respondents were not satisfied/dissatisfied with the drainage management provided by the

city, especially when the rainy season comes, which resulted in flooded streets around the city. Based on the

flood-prone map, some barangays were situated in flood-prone areas, worsening the flooding problem. The

result also shows that the city should manage people with mental health and animals roaming around the city as

they may pose a danger to the public. However, the respondent is satisfied with the services provided by the

city based on the comments/opinions based on the word/ word patterns such as “improve services”, “good

services” and “excellence services”. It is suggested that the city government should improve the city drainage

system to eradicate or minimize flooding during rainy seasons, provide better mental services to stakeholders,

and provide services that will control stray animals that roam around the city since they could endanger the

public.

Key-Words: - Community Needs, Text Analytics, Voyants, Mixed Method Analysis

Received: June 9, 2022. Revised: March 15, 2023. Accepted: April 13, 2023. Published: May 9, 2023.

1 Introduction

Communities are typically characterized by a

geographical area; however, they can also be based

on shared interests or characteristics such as religion,

race, age, or occupation. People within a community

come from different backgrounds and have distinct

cultures, customs, and values, [1], [2]. There is a

need to utilize a wide range of ideas, tools, and

wisdom to assess the community's most significant

needs and create interventions / creative ideas

to improve people's lives. Before conducting a

community needs assessment, you should

understand the different cultural groups within a

community. You should also know how to work

together with them to solve community issues.

Furthermore, a community needs assessment

provides community leaders with a snapshot of local

policy, systems, and environmental change

strategies. It assists them in identifying areas for

improvement. With this data, communities can map

out a course for health improvement, infrastructure

development, and other improvements. This is done

by creating strategies to make positive and

sustainable changes in their communities, [3].

The Community Toolbox, [4], group states that

"in most needs assessment surveys, need means

something that specifically relates to a particular

group or community." It's not usually a universal

need, such as food or affection. But it's more than an

individual need, as in, "I need an updated couch for

the living room," or "I really need a vacation."

Those may truly be needs, but they are not generally

the types of needs assessed in needs assessment

surveys, [5]. Perceptions from the community can

help administrators and policymakers gain new

insights, as well as provide strong commitment and

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Christine Lourrine S. Tablatin,

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support from the communities

themselves, [6]. Conducting an assessment,

particularly in a community, is imperative for many

reasons. As a first step, the community's

sustainability is determined. The second is on the

residents and local officials becoming alert on the

impact of a proposed development on the

community’s social and economic well-being. The

third is about avoiding inequities among community

groups. Assessment encourages positive impacts of

the proposed development, [7].

The City of Urdaneta is a second-class city

founded on January 8, 1858, and acquired city-hold

status under Republic Act 8480, dated January 10,

1998. It is located in the central part of Pangasinan

province with 34 barangays, and based on a recent

survey, its population is about 132,940. The city has

an urbanization level of 53.76 percent and has been

identified as a growth pole by the Provincial

Government of Pangasinan. Agriculture is still the

major source of income and livelihood for the

people, [8]. Urdaneta City is a center of agri-

industrial development and educational

advancement. It is a city with viable solid waste

management, an admirable traffic system,

sustainable social services, and equitable

opportunity. It is also a community of God-loving,

well-disciplined, self-reliant, and development-

oriented people. It shall be an urban growth center

and a model of effective governance in Northern

Luzon. To be able to attain its vision, the mission of

Urdaneta City is to provide adequate infrastructure

facilities and basic social services to promote a

healthy and safe environment, to practice good

governance and dynamic leadership in ensuring

political stability and economic self-sufficiency, and

to promote people's participation in policy

formulation and project implementation, [9], [10].

To meet this mission, periodic assessments should

be performed before taking action. These

assessments will be used to determine current

situations and identify issues for action. By

conducting needs assessments, government

administrators and policymakers will be able to

identify areas for improvement and transform them

into measurable action items. They will also be able

to formulate a specific community strategy to

address each key need. Furthermore, a community

needs assessment is a systematic review of the

existing programs in the community to determine if

there are any gaps, [11]. The results of the needs

assessment can identify where needs are not being

met and may help the city design an appropriate

program/intervention. That’s where a community

needs assessment comes in; it can inform and

improve any community development initiative. A

vital planning process begins with an assessment of

needs. Therefore, continued care to identify the

needs of the community is given priority to ensure

higher citizen satisfaction with public service

delivery.

The main objective of this study is to conduct a

needs assessment focusing primarily on identifying

the community needs in the City of Urdaneta. The

study aims to answer the following:

1. Determine the level of the delivery of social

services in the City of Urdaneta;

2. Determine the opinion/sentiment of

stakeholders in the City of Urdaneta on the

delivery of social services in the City of

Urdaneta;

2 Methods

2.1 Research Design

This study utilized a mixed method whereby data

were collected and analyzed quantitatively and

qualitatively to analyze the community needs of the

City of Urdaneta. The proponents used survey

questionnaires as a primary tool in gathering the

needed data/information. The quantitative data

were used to describe the population that resides in

the city, and they were the respondents to the study.

This method was utilized in order to obtain a direct

picture of the services that the City of Urdaneta is

providing to its stakeholders and provide a better

understanding and explanation of their needs.

2.2 Instrument

The survey instrument was adopted and revised in

line with the objectives of this study. These include

gathering the needed information to assess

community needs, and pilot testing with some

respondents who are not residents of Urdaneta City.

After that, another revision was made to validate the

instrument, and questions that were not clear or

directed were deleted or recast. The questionnaire

was converted into a Google form and distributed

online.

The questionnaire is composed of three sections.

The first part focuses on the profiles of respondents.

The second part of the survey questionnaire was on

the city's services. And the last part is an open

question, focusing on their opinion regarding the

city's services.

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2.3 Respondents of the Study

Families of PSU Urdaneta students who live in the

City of Urdaneta were chosen as respondents. The

list of students residing in Urdaneta City was taken

from the student services offices of the PSU-

Urdaneta City Campus. Then probability sampling

was utilized, specifically the systematic sampling

technique, wherein the proponents used every n

dataset of members of the population.

2.4 Data Preparation and Processing

2.4.1 Data Cleaning

The first step is to clean the collected data. The

study removes tweets that appeared more than once

and the comments/opinions that contain no value

(no answer / n/a, no). Only those

comments/opinions that contain important

comments/opinions were kept and saved for the next

step. Three annotators decide whether

comments/opinions have no value.

2.4.2 Stemming Process

The second step is to distill the comments or

opinions down to their basic form. An automated

stemmer was employed, utilizing a PHP application

and a dictionary of root words stored in a database.

It replaced words based on replacement rules. This

steaming process is very significant so that the

different forms of the same word are reduced to a

common form. The stemming process is a feature

supported by indexing and search. This is a vital

part of text mining applications, natural language

processing (NLP) systems, and information retrieval

(IR) systems.

2.4.3 Stop Words Removal

The following step is to remove all words matching

the stopwords from the given comments and

opinions dataset. An English stop word translated

into Filipino words was used to remove stop words

in the comments or opinions. Stop words were

stored in a database and accessed using the PHP

stop word removal application.

2.4.4 Case Transformation

Under the data Voyant, the first step was

transforming cases. This operator transforms the

case of letters (i.e., lower case or upper case). The

study transforms all letters in the data into lowercase

for the sake of convenience. After case

transformation, tokenization was employed. This

operator splits the comments and opinions into a

series of tokens. Several options can be implied in

splitting the comments and opinions, however, the

proponent selected the default setting, which is the

non-letters.

2.4.5 N-gram

The last step is to utilize the n-gram to learn the

meaning of words and their neighbors by connecting

a sequence of n-words from a given sequence of

comments or opinions.

2.5 Pattern Recognition Process

The schema used to determine the frequency of the

words was TF-IDF, or Term Frequency – Inverse

Document Frequency. This schema was used as a

numeric measure to show the importance of words

describing the services provided by the city. This

was done in the collection of comments/ opinions in

the dataset. The method used to determine the

dominant words and patterns is the frequency of the

appearance of words in the comments/opinions

weighted toward greater importance. The TF-IDF

value increases proportionally to the number of

times a word appears in the comments or opinion,

but is offset by the frequency of the word in the

corpus, which helps to control for the fact that some

words are generally more common than

others. Voyant is a free, online text-analysis

program. Its tools allow you to generate a word

cloud of the most frequent words, generate graphs

of word frequency across the corpus, and compare

multiple documents, [12].

2.6 Tools Use for Text Analytics

2.6.1 Trends

Trends divides texts into ten equal segments to

demonstrate patterns of word use. Trends is a

visualization that represents the frequencies of terms

across documents in a corpus or across segments in

a document, depending on the mode. Each series in

the graph is colored according to the word it

represents. At the top of the graph, a legend displays

which words are associated with which colors. You

can click on words in the legend to toggle their

visibility. Hovering over any point in the graph

causes a callout box to appear with information

about the point. This includes the word, the

frequency (raw or relative depending on mode), and

the document or document segment, [13].

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Fig. 1: Trends with the Works of Jane Austen

Cirrus presents a cloud that displays the top 25–500

words, where higher frequency words have larger

fonts in the center. The word cloud positions the

words such that the terms that occur most frequently

are positioned centrally and are sized the largest. As

the algorithm proceeds through the list and

continues to attempt to draw the words as close as

possible to the center of the visualization, it will also

include small words within spaces left by larger

words that do not fit together snugly. It's imperative

to understand that the color of words and their

absolute position are not significant (if you resize

the window or reload the page, the words may

appear in a different location), [13].

Fig. 2: Cirrus with the Works of Jane Austen

Bubble is a playful visualization of term

frequencies in a document. High-frequency terms

are read in document order, and the current term is

shown in the upper right-hand corner. The list of

terms below shows a ranking of the cumulative

frequencies to that point in the document. The first

time a term is encountered, a bubble is created and

added to the main part of the canvas. The term

flashes in yellow as it's read. According to the

relative size of the bubbles, the frequency of the

current term, [13], compared to other terms in the

document, indicates the frequency.

Fig. 3: Bubbles with the Works of Jane

Austen

2.6 Statistical Analysis

For the profile of the respondents, descriptive

measures like basic counting, frequency, and

percentages were utilized, and results were

presented in tables and graphical forms (charts and

graphs).

For opinions, ideas, and comments on the

services provided by the city government, text

analytics using association rules was utilized. Word

frequency and relations among word patterns were

presented and analyzed using graphics and the

association of words using Voyant tools.

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3 Results and Discussion

3.1 Profile of the Respondents

Table 1. Socio-demographics Profile of the

Respondents

Profile

Sex

Percent

Male

254

49%

Female

266

51%

Total

520

100%

No. Of Year Living in the City of Urdaneta

0-3 years

19%

4-6 years

7-10 years

11-15 years

16-25 years

343

66%

Over 25 years

Total

520

100%

Modes of Residents in the City of Urdaneta

renting

365

70%

buying/own

155

30%

Total

520

100%

Educational Attainment

Grade School

Some High School

High School

Graduate

431

83%

Some

College/Vocational

Vocational School

Graduate

College Graduate

Some Graduate

School

Graduate Degree

Total

520

100%

Monthly Family Income

Less than 10,000

352

68%

10,000 - 14,999

15%

15,000 - 24,999

25,000 - 34,999

35,000 - 49,000

50,000 - 74,999

75,000 - 99,000

100,00 or more

Total

520

100%

In what industry is the major wage earner in your

family employed?

Agriculture

132

25%

Construction

Manufacturing

11%

Retail/Wholesale

Transportation,

Communications,

and Public Utilities

Finance, Insurance,

Real State

Government

15%

(Includes Education)

Services (includes

Retail)

10%

Retired

Homemaker

Student

15%

Mining

Total

520

100%

The results of Table 1 reveal that almost all the

respondents (68%) family income of less than P 10,

000.00 pesos per month. According to Philippine

Statistics Authority (PSA), [14], a family of five

estimated monthly costs of PhP 12,082, on

average in the first semester of 2021. However,

about 70% of the respondents rent their house/room

as they stay in the city. This indicates that the

majority of the residents in the city were below the

poverty line, and they did not have their own

houses. Some of the reasons that can be attributed

to the low income of the respondents were the

following, such as the majority of respondents stated

they are high school graduates, laborers, and

farmers. The result of the research [15], shows that

farmers from the City of Urdaneta who are engaged

in farming don’t own tools and machines for

cultivating their farmlands. Some are engaged in

agriculture. The majority of the farmers served as

tenants and leases as contracted by the

landowners. The result of the study confirms that

only a few responses indicated that they own their

own home, income is below the poverty line, and

college graduates. The results also reveal that the

respondents were considered/to belong to “poor”

families and were expecting more

help/support/services from the city government. The

result reveals that there is a need to provide public

provision of basic social services, especially since

the majority of the city's stakeholders were below

the poverty line or “poor”. Furthermore,

the continued delivery of basic social services must

be enhanced and implemented during this time to

help the poor overcome the high private costs of

utilizing basic public social services, like health

services and other services.

3.2 Level of Delivery Services

Figure 4 reveals that the number one concern of the

respondents is the drainage system of the

city obtained a mean of 358.6 which is the lowest

among all the services that the city provided to its

stakeholders. The main reason for this result is that

in when rainy seasons some parts of the city

are prone to flooding. The result reveals that the city

should improve drainage systems around the city to

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minimize or eradicate flooding during rainy seasons.

Respondents also rated mental health with a mean of

372.2 and animal control services obtained a 362

mean as an urgent concern/need that the city

government should look into. These two services

were not visible in the city wherein a lot of people

with mental health problems and animals are

roaming around the city proper. The figure also

reveals that sidewalk and pedestrian safety, garbage

collection, roads/ streets, library, and street lighting

services obtained an excellent rating from the

respondents. The result indicates that the city

administration should focus on the improvement of

the drainage system of the city to minimize flooding.

In addition, the respondent's concern is the facilities

such as recreational facilities and parks, more

streetlights, and animal control.

Fig. 4: Rate of General Services in the City of

Urdaneta as Perceived by the Community

3.3 Sentiment of the Community of the

Delivery of Social Services by the City of

Urdaneta

Fig. 5: Word Cloud that describes the services

provided by the City

Fig. 6: Connection of Words to describe the

Services provided by the City

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Fig. 7: High-Frequency Terms used to describe the

City's Services

Figures 5, 6, 7, and 8 revealed that the majority of

the words employed by the respondents to describe

the services offered by the city were “excellent”,

“good”, and “fair”. Furthermore, a connection of

words indicates that the city has good and excellent

services and there are also improvements in the

services offered by the city. Likewise, in terms of

the frequency of words used to describe the services

delivered by the city, the word "good" emerged as

the most frequent word, followed by “excellent”.

The results reveal that the city provides "good" and

“excellent” services.

Fig. 8: Sentiments of Respondents on the services

provided by the city

The figures show the sentiment of the respondents

on the services provided by the city. Their

sentiments were considered positive because of the

word/word patterns like “good services”, “improve

services”, “excellent services” and “fair services”.

These were the common words dominating the data

set of comments/opinions/ideas of the respondents

that reside in the city of Urdaneta. This reveals in

the results that the social services provided by the

City of Urdaneta are considered “good”.

4 Conclusion

This study aimed to gather and analyzed to better

understand how city services are being provided by

the City of Urdaneta to its stakeholders.

Furthermore, determine the level of delivery of

these services by the City of Urdaneta and

determine the degree of satisfaction utilizing

sentiment analysis through word/word patterns

association. The result reveals that respondents

were not satisfied/dissatisfied with the drainage

management or flood control services provided by

the city, especially when the rainy season comes,

which resulted in flooded streets around the city

based on the flood-prone map some barangays were

situated into a flood-prone area which worsening the

problem of flooding. The results also show that the

city should manage people with mental health and

animals that roam around the city as they may poise

a danger to the public. However, the respondent is

satisfied with the services provided by the city based

on the comments/opinions based on the word/ word

patterns such as “improve services”, “good

services” and “excellence services”. It is suggested

that the city government should improve the city

drainage system to eradicate or minimize flooding

during rainy seasons, provide better mental services

to stakeholders, and provide services that will

control stray animals that roam around the city since

they could endanger the public.

Analyzing and evaluating the services provided

by as certain institution can be done using

qualitative data and analyzed using text analytics.

This is a very effective way to analyze and evaluate

products and services because it is a direct opinion

and feeling coming from respondents.

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Volume 20, 2023

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Contribution of Individual Authors to the

Creation of a Scientific Article (Ghostwriting

Policy)

Christine Lourrine S. Tablatin, Michael E.. Acosta

and Frederick F. Patacsil, collaboratively conducted

the research.

Sources of Funding for Research Presented in a

Scientific Article or Scientific Article Itself

No funding was received for conducting this study.

Conflict of Interest

The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.

Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0

(Attribution 4.0 International, CC BY 4.0)

This article is published under the terms of the

Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

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