Author: jdeboe (Page 1 of 4)

When trying to figure out why young adults are not fully on board with community engagement in the modern day, many people do not factor in the idea that location is everything. Our modern society is littered with external stimuli and stressors for people to encounter, so much to the point where many people are not concerned with issues that do not directly impact their day-to-day lives. Going into my research on young adult engagement, I want to focus on issues that directly impact people based on the specific region where the problem is occurring. For this, I plan on visiting and researching local sites that work towards fixing community problems in certain regions. However, there are several variables that I will need to factor in before I work towards implementing my plan with Heartlands. 

As with any research project, there are a few data points that I will need to gather during the implementation process. First off, I need to assess what specific problem each site is working to mitigate. Since I plan on using region specific causes to convince young adults to be more active in their communities, having a clear idea of the main issue at hand will be crucial for my plans going forward. After that, I will need to find out what communities are primarily affected by this problem. Promoting an organization that is attempting to solve an issue in one or more specified regions is the best plan for engaging people in those communities. Also, I must find out what the average adult can do to contribute to the cause. This last piece of information will be the key to convincing young adults to support these organizations. If young people are given a task to complete that is both transparent and beneficial to their community, they will be more likely to follow through with it. Unfortunately, there are multiple obstacles that could hinder me from findings these exact data points. For instance, many of the problems being worked on at these local sites may not be specific to a certain region. Some of these issues may be shared between multiple cities, with their severity varying between each region. This could make it difficult to give people a problem that directly impacts their lives. Along with that, many of these sites may not offer an exact mission statement besides donating to local causes, which not every young adult is in the best position to do. Another issue in the implementation process is coordinating these plans with the community organization I am working with. 

During the course of my research, I will be partnering with Heartlands Conservancy to carry out my plans. The majority of Heartland’s role in my research project will be giving me advice on local sites to visit and what to look out for. While I do not believe there will be any conflicts on ideas for research, I will still need to ensure that my plans align with theirs. The sites that I will visit and the causes that I will support will have to relate to agriculture and the use of water behind it. The agriculture aspect could be a limiting factor, but I believe I will still find enough sites that also fight for those same causes. In the end, my community partners seem excited for my plans, so I know that I will have their support throughout this research process whenever I need it. 

One of the best examples of researchers pulling information from archives comes from an article titled “City of Water: Port-au-Prince, Inequality, and the Social Meaning of Rain”. The author of this article, Claire Antone Payton, clearly understands how crucial bias is when looking into historical events. For example, she includes accounts from Haitian residents such as Diefe Ofe. This ensures that her study reflects the real-life experiences of the people of Haiti instead of reflecting records provided by the elites in their society. 

Oftentimes, pieces of a story are left out of records or archives in order to favor the perspectives of the elites. This is known as archival silence, or gatekeeping, which can alter the way we see history if the truth is never revealed. When information is hidden from researchers, it can lead to them providing false or inaccurate data to the public. On the other hand, the researchers could hold out on releasing the results of their studies if they are aware that missing data is out there, but that does not always happen. 

If I were to use archives in my research on water equity issues, I would most likely try to find sources on the history of the Mississippi River. However, this task would end up proving rather difficult the further I search. Since much of the history of the Mississippi revolves around Native American tribes, finding more information on that topic would be challenging. Performing archival research is not as easy as one might think. There are several obstacles that a researcher must overcome in order to do it right. Fortunately, the results are often worth the challenge. 

While the failure of the Challenger flight may have started with faulty O-rings in the space shuttle, its fate was sealed after NASA decided to ignore the issue. In the time of the Challenger’s launch, the popularity with space exploration had begun to dissipate. Due to this, NASA desperately wanted the Challenger mission to work, in order to excite the public and start making shuttle flights famous again. 

Even though not all the people working on the Challenger mission were willing to do whatever it took to succeed, the ones who did had nobody to stop them. Despite the many warnings given to the higher-ups at NASA, the engineers who predicted the Challenger’s explosion were ignored every time. NASA knew that the future of space exploration was resting on the results of this flight. So, when engineers at Morton Thiokol showed NASA data of the shuttle’s predicted explosion, they simply ignored it. 

Social facilitation played a major role in this as well. While the workers were overseen by the NASA officials, there was not one present to keep the officials in check. They made poor judgment after poor judgment without anyone being around to convince them otherwise. This imbalance of power made it to where the engineers could suggest something to the NASA officials, but they could not tell them what decisions to make. All they could do was sit back and hope that NASA was following their advice. 

Not all research studies can collect their evidence from modern sources. Many of them require evidence from historical sources, or archives. One of the best examples of researchers pulling information from archives comes from an article titled “City of Water: Port-au-Prince, Inequality, and the Social Meaning of Rain”. 

The author of this article, Claire Antone Payton, clearly understands how crucial bias is when looking into historical events. For example, she includes accounts from Haitian residents such as Diefe Ofe. This ensures that her study reflects the real-life experiences of the people of Haiti instead of reflecting records provided by the elites in their society. 

Oftentimes, pieces of a story are left out of records or archives in order to favor the perspectives of the elites. This is known as archival silence, or gatekeeping, which can alter the way we see history if the truth is never revealed. When information is hidden from researchers, it can lead to them providing false or inaccurate data to the public. On the other hand, the researchers could hold out on releasing the results of their studies if they are aware that missing data is out there, but that does not always happen. 

If I were to use archives in my research on water equity issues, I would most likely try to find sources on the history of the Mississippi River. However, this task would end up proving rather difficult the further I search. Since much of the history of the Mississippi revolves around Native American tribes, finding more information on that topic would be challenging. 

Performing archival research is not as easy as one might think. There are several obstacles that a researcher must overcome in order to do it right. Fortunately, the results are often worth the challenges. 

When talking about common survey methods, the two that first come to mind with researchers would be interviews and focus groups. However, these research approaches can often fail in reaching their primary goals. When most people think about interviews, the idea of jobs interviews could be the first thought that appears in their head. Keeping this mindset throughout a research interview would most likely lead to the interviewee being more nervous and less willing to tell the complete truth, since their main focus will be finding the “right” answer, instead of finding their answer. One possible way this could be reworded in order to put the participants more at ease would be to introduce them as questionnaires instead of interviews. 

Beyond that, the researchers themselves could also influence the responses from the participants. The way the questions are phrased often has an impact on the answers given. For example, a researcher could ask a question such as “Do you believe the new law that was passed is just?”, or they could ask it as “How do you feel about the new law that was passed?”. The first way may persuade a participant to say yes, while the second way excludes any bias. Many researchers may not realize it, but the way they ask a question can cause their responses to be less accurate.  

So, after a researcher conducts an interview and gets the responses, their study is complete, right? Not quite yet. Perhaps the most important part of conducting interviews is interpreting their results afterwards. Since interviews often provide more qualitative data than quantitative data, grouping similar responses is difficult, but crucial to seeing how many people answered a question a certain way. The struggle is finding a balance between putting similar responses in the same category, while not forcing a complex answer into a certain box. Failure at either one of these could cause many viewpoints to be ignored in a given study. Despite all the difficulties that come with interviews and focus groups, when done right, they can offer a lot of insight into the experiences and struggles of people from any given commnity.