What are people’s impressions of the heath of Long Island Sound? Have their perceptions changed over time? Do Long Island Sound residents appreciate and enjoy the Sound and its connecting rivers, streams, and bays? Do they care about the Sound, and are they willing to become stewards of the Sound, including by volunteering for an activity such as a beach cleanup or improving their environmental practices around their homes and in their communities?
These are some of the questions 3,700 residents were asked in 2024 in a wide-ranging survey conducted for Connecticut Sea Grant with support from the Long Island Sound Partnership. The survey covered a region of nearly 7 million people in Connecticut and New York who live in the Long Island Sound watershed. One of its findings reveals that while impressions of water quality is mixed, there is a significant improvement in people’s perceptions of the Sound being healthier compared to the last time the watershed population was surveyed in 2006.. The survey also reveals that people who were more aware of their local river, stream, or bay are more likely to care about the Sound.
The Informed and Engaged Public work group will be relying on the survey to help Partnership staff as well as stakeholder groups identify some of the key reasons that prevent Long Island Sound residents from appreciating and accessing the Sound and becoming better stewards of the Sound. To identify gaps, more than 80 questions were asked in the following categories:
The sample size of more than 3,700 residents produced a margin of sampling error of no more than ±1.6 percent at the 95 percent confidence level, meaning that if every adult resident of the region had been interviewed, the actual results could be expected to fall within that margin at least 95 percent of the time.
The report is available as a PDF document download in the LIS Partnership’s media center.
The resources below can be used to dive deeper into specific data sets from the Public Perception Survey. Click below to access data tables with some segmented results (this document includes a guide on how to read these tables) and to read the survey questionnaire. When looking to explore the data through the data tables, we recommend first looking over the survey questionnaire to find the question you are interested in, then finding the table related to that question.
If you have questions or need assistance exploring the data from this survey, please reach out to Jimena Perez-Viscasillas at jbp255@cornell.edu.
Click below to watch a webinar recording covering some of the key findings from the survey and how they can be applied. The video also includes a brief explanation on how to read the data tables listed above (timestamp: 46:12). This webinar was hosted on October 14, 2025 by LIS Partnership and New York Sea Grant with featured speaker Steve Raabe of OpinionWorks.
This slide presentation prepared by OpinionWorks also highlights some of the key findings of the survey:
When survey respondents were asked, “What three adjectives come to your mind when you think about Long Island Sound?” the response was overwhelmingly positive. As illustrated in the word cloud above, “beautiful” and “fun” were the two most commonly mentioned words. (Word that appear larger in this graphic were mentioned more often.) The emotional words “peaceful,” “relaxing,” “calm,” “serene,” and “refreshing” figured prominently. Activity words like “fishing,” “swimming,” and boating” were mentioned frequently. “Beach” was commonly mentioned. Though people’s impressions are predominantly positive, some more negative words do appear. “Dirty” and “polluted” are visible in the word cloud, as is “crowded.”
Read the results of the 2006 Public Perception Survey in the media center.
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