Port of Houston Authority Disparity Study

VRA’s scope of work for the Port of Houston Authority (PHA) 2020 Disparity Study under Griffin & Strong was to conduct an online survey from a database of approximately 20,000 and provide follow-up reminders to encourage participation over a four-week time period. This effort required weekly email reminders to the contacts. The prime supplied the contact database and the survey questions. VRA was responsible for cleaning the database before the survey could be implemented.

The second phase of the assignment was to undertake a telephone survey to attempt to achieve a goal of 500 completed surveys. Five of VRA’s surveyors were assigned to make these calls over a period of six weeks; they successfully complete 448 surveys. The prime supplied the contact database; the same survey from phase one was utilized.

For the telephone survey, the VRA survey team reached out to each contact in the database a maximum of four times. The database consisted of firms located within the PHA Metropolitan Statistical Area area that ranged from small D/W/MBE firms to multi-million dollar construction companies. The contact database delivered to VRA contained approximately 3,500 names that required extensive verification by the VRA staff. After cleaning, the viable contacts from the database were reduced by almost half due to extensive firm duplication.

As an add-on service requested by the prime, VRA cleaned and analyzed the data, condensing the information into cross-tabulation reports showing gender and ethnicity – one report for online and one report for telephone. The final reports were formatted in Adobe InDesign.

Project Structure
Prime: Griffin & Strong, LP VRA served as subconsultant.
Scope of Work
  • Stakeholder online survey development and implementation
  • Stakeholder telephone survey implementation
  • Data analysis and reporting