Here are the results of our first Brooklyn Board survey. I was very pleased with the number of responses, considering the relative newness of this board. The Bronx Board's first survey brought in about 30% fewer responses, but the population difference between the two boroughs would account for most of that. A lot of you noticed that I neglected to include Military Service as one of the reasons for leaving. I've included that category in the results here since a number of you wrote that in as "Other". One person submitted more than one response (I accepted only one), and two responses didn't contain enough usable information.

For the statisticians out there, you'll know what I mean when I say that the sample is insufficient for valid interpolation. (Hey, we English majors are allowed to know other subjects too!) Regardless of the data's shortcomings, it's interesting to know some of this stuff. I'll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions from these results.

It was interesting to note the large number of people (more than half) who left Brooklyn during the seventies. Were you all embarrased by John Travolta's depiction of Brooklyn "kul-cha" in Saturday Night Fever?.

The total number of unique, usable responses was 97.

The average of the span of years of people living in Brooklyn was 1947 through 1970.
This means that the average number of years you guys lived in Brooklyn was 22, and this is identical to the Bronx Board's result.

The neighborhood breakdown was as follows:

(Percentages are of all responses, rounded to nearest integer)

Neighborhood	Count	Percentage
Bath Beach	1	1%
Bay Ridge	6	6%
Bedford-Stuyvesant	1	1%
Bensonhurst	6	6%
Boro Park	3	3%
Brighton Beach	7	7%
Brownsville	1	1%
Canarsie	6	6%
Coney Island	7	7%
Crown Heights	1	1%
East Flatbush	3	3%
East New York	1	1%
Flatbush	26	27%
Graves End	1	1%
Greenpoint	2	2%
Manhattan Beach	1	1%
Marine Park	3	3%
Midwood	8	8%
Mill Basin	3	3%
Sea Gate	3	3%
Sheepshead Bay	6	6%
Not sure	1	1%

How old were you when you left Brooklyn?

What were the reasons you left Brooklyn?
(Multiple responses were allowed, so the sum of the percentages exceeds 100.)

Reason	Count	Percentage
A Better Life	26	27%
Career Opportunities	23	24%
College/Graduate School	30	31%
Crime/Lack of Safety	4	4%
Educational Opportunities (i.e. better schools)	7	7%
Family Obligations (marriage/divorce/etc.)	22	23%
General Deterioration of the Neighborhood	11	11%
Hated City Life	6	6%
Housing Opportunities	11	11%
Just Needed A Change	18	19%
Military Service	6	6%
Never Left	1	1%
Other*	0	0%

*Although many of you provided answers in the "Other" category, I was able to apply each to one of the specific reasons listed.

Do you still think of Brooklyn as "home"?

Thanks again to those who participated. A number of neighborhoods were listed in the survey, but drew no responses, such as Red Hook, Gerritsen Beach, etc. To conserve space here, I only included those neighborhoods that had at least one response. Geographically, Flatbush is not the largest neighborhood in Brooklyn (Flatlands is), but certainly one of the most densely populated, which might account for its large proportion of responses among all the neighborhoods. Someone also pointed out that the population of Flatbush in the fifties and sixties was mostly "middle class on the rise", which might have led to a large percentage of its resident children going to college and subsequently becoming part of the computer-literate family slice that makes up most of the bulletin boards' visitors.

So what will the next survey be? Where we're living now, and what schools we attended while living in Brooklyn. Look for them soon.