As a professional survey team seeks to interview residents of 1,000 Jewish homes in San Diego County between now and mid-December, staff members of the United Jewish Federation may be tempted to sing the chorus from an old rock song by the Orlons: 

Don’t hang up (No No) 
Oh don’t you do it now,
don’t hang up (No No)

The telephone surveys are necessary to give the United Jewish Federation an accurate demographic picture of San Diego County’s Jewish community. How many of us are here? Where do we live? What are our needs? What are our interests? 
Andrea Oster and Glenda Sachs Jaffe, respectively the chair and project manager for the UJF committee overseeing the study, said if you receive a call from a surveyor, it will take approximately 20-30 minutes to answer all the questions. The telephone interviewers will have been trained by International Communications Research and Ukeles & Associates. 
The survey calls will be made before 9 p.m. every night exclusive of Shabbat. If you are at dinner, watching a television show or entertaining and would like to be questioned at a more convenient time, you can schedule a call-back appointment. 
Five hundred contributors to the United Jewish Federation will be surveyed along with 500 other Jews reached through random telephone dialing. In the latter category, callers will ask people who answer the phone whether there is a Jewish person living in the household. If not, the person answering will be thanked and the telephone call will be terminated. If there is a Jewish person, the surveying will proceed. 
Based on the answers of both sets of respondents, the United Jewish Federation will be able to plan its spending over the next several years. For example, does the community need to build more senior centers, and if so, where? Are there enough Jewish day school classrooms to serve the needs of the population? Are more programs needed for singles? 
While one may be tempted to predict the polling results on these and other questions, beware: Members of other communities have been surprised by the results of similar surveys. 
For example, the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles found through its demographic study that far more Jewish singles lived in that area than had been estimated, that 10 percent of the Jewish population was living in poverty and that more than half of that group was disabled, Jews were moving to suburban communities not thought of as “Jewish areas,” and that two-thirds of the Jewish children in Los Angeles were not receiving any Jewish education. 
According to a local UJF briefing paper, following the survey Los Angeles started new programs for Jewish young single professionals, made investments in community infrastructure, such as JFS offices, in underserved suburbs, restructured social-service programs to better serve the indigent disabled, and made new investments in Jewish education. 
In Denver, a similar study found that the Jewish population had increased twice as quickly as the general population over a 16-year-period. It also found that the number of divorced Jews was far higher than thought there. 
In Las Vegas, prior to a study it was assumed that more than half the community was composed of retirees. The survey found that only one-quarter of the population was 65 or older. The survey also found that 7.7 percent of all households in Las Vegas have at least one Jewish member. 
The committee that decided what demographic issues should be covered in the survey included Oster, Larry Acheatel, Melissa Garfield Bartell, Edgar Berner, Michael Cohen, Julie Datnow, Merle Fischlowitz, Marcia Hazan, Gary Jacobs, David Kahan, Marjory Kaplan, Gary Kornfeld, Rabbi Martin Lawson, Michael Moskowitz, Alan Nevin, Jane Scher, Mary Ann Scher, Steve Solomon, Jill Spitzer and Charles Zibbell. 
Results from the survey are expected to be collated before next July.