The last two weeks have been really exciting for our group, being able to see our project in the context of the community itself, as well as looking forward to designing our final deliverable based on the needs of the community and San Mateo county at large.
On Friday October 30th, our group led a focus group with a few members from the Climate Ready North Fair Oaks team to present our findings thus far. After reflecting on the most prominent themes from the master codebook in NVivo, we chose to focus our presentation on the following overarching categories: compounding stressors, information and resources, dealing with COVID-19, environment and climate, emotions and resiliency. Each team member incorporated specific quotes in both English and Spanish into their dedicated topic, as well as talking through any notable statistics (e.g. percentage coverage of helpful resources under the “Resource Availability” code). CRNFO were very responsive to the information we provided. The inclusion of a quick discussion of the interview demographics was useful for our community partners to put our findings in the context of the entire North Fair Oaks / Redwood City population. They were also able to draw parallels between feedback they’d received from other sources to the more personal stories that we added to the discussion. Much of the input and observations from the 4 CRNFO members covered a lack of accessible/understandable information in a variety of languages, the importance of culture in the community (churches play a key role and could be a venue for communicating information), the need for public shelters during the pandemic, and what resources people use when they can’t pay rent. Further to this, we were informed of a number of organizations and resources that would be interested in our work, or could provide useful information to our study such as RWC 2020, Undocu support, and the Community Collaboration for Children's Successes. We also really appreciated their critiquing of our presentation, for example, one suggested separating the quotes out onto individual slides to make them even more powerful and allow time for the audience to read the quote and focus on the point we are delivering. Another idea was to divide each topic out into its different sub-sections so an outsider can relate our coding categories to what we were seeing most across the interviews. These are definitely aspects of presenting that we will look to incorporate into our final presentation next week. Our team has now entered the most difficult process of the project where we must decide how our work can best benefit CRNFO and the community at large. In recent discussions, our focus has been surrounding the potential of creating an infographic. We have struggled with the following questions:
As for the first two questions, our initial vision was to create a visual that could be posted to social media accounts, allowing younger members of the community to receive information and educate others around them. However, after hearing feedback from the focus group, we learnt that churches play a key role in communicating information in North Fair Oaks and Redwood City. This led us to question the effectiveness an infographic would have if relayed over Instagram, as opposed to creating posters that could be shared in churches or other community service locations. In addition, we have to consider which members and generations of the community are experiencing the impact of multiple stressors the most, and therefore, where we should direct the bulk of our action. Other suggestions for the target audience include San Mateo county and policymakers who would be more interested in the themes that emerged from the interviews and potential next steps. Integrating demographics into our representations will also give readers a better sense of what was said in the interviews. After class discussions about technology and the future of sustainable smart cities, it was interesting to draw parallels between the potential of using technology to provide services, and how services are actually being implemented in Bay Area cities. San Francisco has been pinpointed as one of the top smart cities in the US, however, we still see such large gaps between the availability of resources and how technology is being utilised to allow sustainable and equitable access. If we had more time to work on this project, a next step could be to work with CRNFO and other tech-centered organizations to build in ‘smart’ aspects to the distribution of information and resources across underrepresented communities such as North Fair Oaks. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward After receiving feedback composed of a number of questions and suggestions, we have been able to narrow down and separate out the themes from our initial coding of the project transcripts into the general outline for our final deliverables (an expanded memo for CRNFO and an infographic directed towards San Mateo county). It will be important for us to reflect on the comments from CRNFO to provide a deliverable that is both timely and relevant to suit the community needs at present, as well as looking to help San Mateo county build a more sustainable community for the future. It is necessary that we find better ways to inform every community member of the information and resources available to them, and to make these more accessible in times of stress. Hopefully, building infographics that can be dispersed using a variety of platforms (social media, posters around resident locations, in churches and schools etc.) will help educate people across multiple generations so we can start a cycle of discovering information and passing it along by word-of-mouth to friends and family. Additionally, our memo being aimed at community organizations and policy makers is critical to moving forward with this project beyond the scope of Sustainable Cities. What makes this project special is that it will be benefiting the community of Redwood City/North Fair Oaks after this quarter is over. While brainstorming for our deliverable, we kept in mind the document we read for class on Plan Bay Area. We thought about how dense it was and how its length is participating in barriers of accessibility. As a result, the memo and infographic combination was born, with the well-being of the community being at the center. Update on Project Activities
Within these past two weeks, our project has really started to transform into its final stages, we are starting to design our final deliverable and are awaiting feedback on what would be the most helpful for us to dive into in the few weeks we have left in the quarter. We spent a significant amount of time in the early stages of the project getting acquainted with the goals of the work that was being done and listening to and transcribing interviews, but the work has really shifted towards sharing our analysis of themes we have seen in the previously conducted and transcribed interviews and creating a final product that can hopefully be used for future research or constructing community resources by Climate Ready North Fair Oaks (CRNFO). One of our group’s biggest accomplishments has been putting all of our coding of each transcript for the North Fair Oaks and Redwood City community members together in one master file in NVivo. This was a challenging step for us to complete, as we were working with a software that we are all unfamiliar with. The challenge mainly arose when our codes were not identical and thus would not merge into one project. This error involved going back and fixing capitalizations and punctuation in each person's code a few times to ensure that we all matched up our work to do effective analysis of the transcripts. Once this step was complete, it was really exciting for us to be able to see how our hard work over the past few weeks came together. From this new master file, we have been able to analyze trends in the interview and discover overarching themes to help guide our project and share information with CRNFO. This involved breaking down the interviews and collecting “remarkable quotes” as well as compiling our initial findings and statistics on how often each theme was mentioned, and what kind of commonalities people shared as far as stressors, resources, and information. Moving forward to Friday of week 7, we will present our findings and gather feedback from stakeholders in our control group with CRNFO. Preparing for this has involved meeting as a team and with Stephanie to discuss the research and findings of our analysis, coming up with an agenda for how we will conduct the control group, deciding how to highlight our work in a way that is helpful for CRNFO, and lastly, establishing what we are hoping to gain and making sure we will ask the right questions to prepare for the final stages of our project. The ultimate goal of the control group presentation is to share our findings, but more importantly, to get feedback from the community members to help us create a deliverable in which we can figure out how to best serve the communities that are being impacted most by both the pandemic and climate change related factors. What We Observed and Learned Our analysis of the interviews has taught us a lot about what the communities we are engaging with are going through and how they are handling navigating these challenging times, sometimes without the resources they need. The statistical breakdown of common themes across interviews, paired with the remarkable quotes, have really helped paint a picture of the hardships and places where people need help. In our research, we found that 100% of the interviews mentioned resources- how they have been unhelpful, how some are unaware of the resources that may be offered to them, or how they are limited when it comes to accessing both COVID-19 updates as well as wildfire information and resources. We saw that the two most mentioned compounding stressors are social interactions and physical health, both being very important when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic and wildfires. We paid special attention to the wildfire-Covid relationship, because this is something that CRNFO is particularly interested in understanding through the research that we are doing. We found that people were really struggling with navigating both events at the same time, and that brainstorming ways to help communities cope with the effects of a wildfire in the midst of a pandemic will be very important in the success of these communities in the future. This information has really helped shape what we will share with the control group as well as how we can better provide resources for those at risk or with limited access. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward We have learned a lot these past few weeks about the communities that are surrounding the Bay Area and the ways in which special attention needs to be paid towards vulnerable groups during catastrophic events that may become increasingly more common. Compiling all of the interviews has been so helpful for identifying trends and understanding what are the biggest issues at hand for these areas. We are really excited to learn even more after talking to the stakeholders- it’s one thing to listen to interviews and observe, but it’s going to be another helpful component to have real discussions with those heavily involved and impacted. After the control group, we hope to have a better idea and understanding of what we need to propose in our final deliverable and how we can help serve these communities better. Doing this research has been particularly helpful in getting a look at personal stories of the people who make up a large part of the discussions in our class meetings. The people who shared their stories through these interviews are from places that have been especially hard hit by not only the pandemic and climate change, but also by the effects of increasing inequality in the bay area, and though it has been heartbreaking to learn what these communities are facing right now, it has been so interesting to be able to learn about this alongside our class discussions of gentrification, housing insecurity, and the compounding factors of Covid-19. Update on Project Activities
Over the past two weeks we have made significant progress with collaborating on and coding the transcripts. Each of us has completely coded two full transcripts in NVIVO, using the same codebook, and we are now in the process of combining these into one large NVIVO file. Once this is done we will be able to come up with some common themes as well as some summary statistics to present to Climate Ready North Fair Oaks in our meeting with them one week from today. In addition to transcribing and coding the interviews, we have been extensively communicating with Stephanie about expectations for our upcoming meeting with Climate Ready North Fair Oaks. These conversations have mostly revolved around what work we are expected to have completed by then, as well as what the general format of the meeting should be. From these conversations with Stephanie, we have learned the following general expectations for the upcoming meeting:
After our meetings with Stephanie about what is expected of us in the meeting with CRNFO, we have come up with a detailed agenda for the meeting in which we will share our process and key findings for the first half of the meeting, and have a discussion with the members of CRNFO for the second half of the meeting. The discussion will primarily feature questions revolving around what we may be missing or overlooking in our research, as well as what the most effective final deliverable would be. We suspect that, while we have come up with an extensive codebook for the interviews, there are most likely many intricacies in the interviews that we are missing as a result of being fairly removed from this community. We believe that our community partners’ more intimate relationship with the North Fair Oaks community will mean that they can suggest some more codes for us to consider pursuing that we may well have missed. The ultimate goal is to give CRNFO a deliverable that can help them advocate for the North Fair Oaks Community in whichever way they see most valuable. For that reason it is important to us that we take a significant amount of time to communicate with them about their needs and vision for the project. What We Learned and Observed Our meetings with Stephanie this week were particularly useful not only for logistical reasons, but also for making us think more critically about the community engaged research we are doing. We talked extensively about tailoring our upcoming presentation to our audience, who will not be made up of members of academia. This has implications for the way we present our research as well as the way we talk about these incredibly painful topics. Our community partners will most likely not be familiar with NVIVO software, but this by no means signifies that their input is invalid. This simply means that talking about the substance of our research is going to be more important than talking about the specifics of coding in NVIVO. Stephanie also reminded us that the pandemic has greatly affected many of the folks we will be meeting with, and as a result we must proceed with an abundance of care and compassion when we talk about these topics. This is an incredibly difficult time for a lot of people, and we need to be mindful of the ways in which we speak about sickness, economic hardship, food insecurity, etc. It was really helpful for Stephanie to remind us of this and bring it to the forefront of the way that we go about this process. Overall we are incredibly grateful to her for helping us be more mindful in our approach to this community based research. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Much of what we learned over the past two weeks from this project (as well as from the course material) is that our community partners make our research better! Our research is not improved by thinking that we academics are the world’s saviors, in fact, that kind of attitude is incredibly debilitating to the significance of our work, especially when it needs to be based in community. This upcoming meeting is an opportunity to receive feedback on what we can do better and how we can be of more use to the North Fair Oaks community. Ultimately, incorporating feedback and ideas from CRNFO at every step of this process will mean that our research will be able to better understand the complexities of the situation, which will in turn result in better advocacy and results for North Fair Oaks. This attitude of doing community based research with our community partners, as opposed to for them, is what we believe will make this project a success. Moving forward, we have our agenda set for our meeting on Friday, and the only thing left for us to do is compile all of our NVIVO projects into one master file to be able to look at all of our data in one place. We have started this process already and will most likely complete it in the next couple of days. We have also scheduled a meeting with just the students for next week so we can better prepare for the meeting with CRNFO. After that meeting with CRNFO on Friday, we believe we will have a much more defined direction to pursue for the rest of the quarter, and we look forward to seeing what our final deliverable will look like! Update on Project Activities
Over the last two weeks, our team placed a heavy focus on transcribing the interviews conducted by Climate Ready North Fair Oaks (CRNFO) and Stanford Future Bay Initiative (SFBI) with community members from North Fair Oaks and the wider population of San Mateo and Santa Clara county. These in-depth, hour-long interviews asked a range of questions from people’s way of life before the pandemic to their perceptions of the virus to resources that have been of help to them both mentally and physically. Simultaneously transcribing and reading through the interviews allowed us to immerse ourselves in the stories that were being told and truly get an understanding of the multiple stressors people experience in low-income communities, specifically in Redwood City and North Fair Oaks. Our next step was to create a shared codebook with the intent of picking out common themes across the interviews and bringing a fresh perspective to the project. Through the process of inductive coding (an open and exploratory technique where codes are created from the themes we see emerging in the data), 7 key themes emerged: compounding stressors, natural hazards, resource availability, information, emotions, reasons for dwelling location, COVID protections and resiliency. Each member of our team took two interviews to code using the qualitative analysis program NVivo. The intention of coding is to assign codes from the codebook to words or phrases to help capture the overarching themes across multiple interview data, allowing us to better analyze the results in weeks to come. After communicating with our project leader Stephanie, we decided that simply coding words and phrases is not always enough, since NVivo has the feature of providing a percentage coverage for a particular code over one interview. We thought this could be a useful analysis tool for communicating our findings to the community partner focus group in a few weeks, so the decision was made to code everything that references any one of the codes. We are also using the tools available in NVivo to create visuals to represent our observations. After some helpful input with regards to our initial codebook, we may also include a ‘notable quotes’ code to coalesce powerful quotes that summarize the most salient themes. As of now, our current investigation surrounds the questions: what compounding stressors people are facing in conjunction with COVID-19? How are they dealing with it? What We Observed and Learned The process of transcription and the creation of a codebook enabled us to locate emerging resource gaps and see where information is lacking in vulnerable communities. For example, after coding two interviews, some of us were able to see that large portions of the conversations were covered by the codes ‘unhelpful resources’, ‘need for more help’, ‘ limited access’ and ‘lack of awareness’. In just one interview from a 70-year-old Hispanic resident in Redwood City, we saw 9.33% coverage for these negative factors surrounding resource availability, compared to only 2.22% for ‘helpful resources’. This describes the drastic limitations people are experiencing. However, our team needs to bring many more coded interviews together before we can start to get a sense of entire community needs and experiences. We also plan to integrate demographic statistics into our basic analysis to be presented to the CRNFO community partners to begin to relate specific stressors to age, gender, ethnicity, location, language and employment status. Coalescing our coded interviews from North Fair Oaks and Redwood City in NVivo will not only be an important step towards building clearer insights into our initial observations, but it will help our team see the project from a broader perspective. After meeting as a group to reevaluate our direction, we are now refocusing our efforts from the interviews and transcripts to understanding the goals of our project in collaboration with the community partners. Asking ourselves questions surrounding what will be the most helpful information for CRNFO, what final deliverable will have the most impact at the end of the project to influence the community at large, and assessing whether there is more to be learnt from the community residents will help our team bring in the concepts of sustainability from class and apply it to the project. It is important that we keep in mind the goal to build safe, equitable and sustainable communities that provide both socioeconomic and environmental stability. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Moving forward, we have two main types of objectives: short- and long-term. The short-term objectives are oriented towards preparing for the focus group with community representatives from CRNFO on October 30th. First, our group will finish transcribing and coding the interviews from North Fair Oaks and Redwood City. Although a majority of the transcribing and coding is done, we still have two more interviews to transcribe and we plan to polish our coding by adding codes such as ‘Remarkable Quotes’. After these tasks are completed, our group will create a master NVivo file of the 14 coded interviews to qualitatively analyze them. There are many tools in NVivo that we plan to explore to start the analysis. One tool we could start with is the ‘Coverage’ tool, which tells us how often certain codes show up in the interview. This could be useful in identifying common themes, such as unhelpful or needed resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. While we analyze the interviews, we will also plan the hour long focus group with CRNFO. This focus group will allow us to present significant themes and insights from the interviews to the community representatives of CRNFO. We’d also like to present any findings that stand out in relation to climate resiliency and COVID-19. After presenting our analysis, the community representatives will give us feedback on how we can better communicate our findings and what they’d like us to look into further for the final deliverable. We would also like to ask for feedback on what type of final deliverable they’d prefer and how we can ensure our work is valuable and applicable to their advocacy efforts. Some questions we need to consider when doing our analysis and planning the focus group are: * Who are the specific community members from CRNFO that we are presenting to? * Based on these community members’ experiences and interests, how can we present the key findings in an accessible and engaging way? Powerpoint? Graphics? NVivo? * To what extent do the community members have experience with qualitative analysis tools like NVivo? * What feedback do we need from the community representatives to ensure our final deliverable is valuable to their climate resiliency and pandemic-related efforts? Conducting this focus group in a thoughtful manner is important for learning how we can best support CRNFO. In our class reading “Chinatown Shop Talk”, we learned how Mei Lum and Diane Wong thoughtfully organized events for Manhattan’s Chinatown regarding gentrification and changes in the community. One key theme from that interview is the importance of stakeholder experiences and perspectives when conducting community-based research. Mei Lum and Diane Wong discussed the differences in perspectives between intergenerational audiences and how such differences can complicate community dialogue regarding gentrification. They used such insights about intergenerational differences to plan events that would actually foster dialogue between intergenerational audiences. By actively considering the perspectives of stakeholders, Mei Lum and Diane Wong uplifted the community rather than extracting from it. We are trying to mirror Mei Lum and Diane Wong’s thoughtful approach in community-based research when planning this focus group. We would like to consider the individual representatives of CRNFO as well as the organization itself when planning how we will present our analysis of the interviews. Afterall, we do not want our research to be extractive and inaccessible. We want our research to aid CRNFO in assessing what the North Fair Oaks and Redwood City communities need to build capacity for climate change resiliency and pandemic-related solutions. As mentioned before, our group is refocusing our efforts towards understanding what it means to be working in this academic partnership and community-based research. We acknowledge that we are actively shaping the trajectory of this sustainability research, and we take this responsibility seriously. Between now and the final deliverable, we will reflect individually and as a team on what we can do to ensure we are providing CRNFO with the information and resources they need. As academics, we will also reflect on whether there are power dynamics or imbalances in this partnership and how we can mitigate such imbalances. There is not a clear roadmap for this reflection, but we plan to discuss our thoughts through Slack and our weekly Zoom meetings. Update on Project Activities
The first two weeks have been a great introduction to the team as well as the project. We spent time meeting with our community partner introducing ourselves, sharing our interest in the project, and our overall goals for the class. From there, we dove right into transcribing our first recorded interviews. This consisted of listening to interviews and verifying that the transcripts were accurate and respected the confidentiality of the interviewee. After doing so, we collaborated with one another to address key themes in the interviews and reflected on our takeaways. The second week we met as a whole group with Stephanie, our community partner, to go over the interviews we transcribed. We talked as a group about key themes and powerful quotes. We were also introduced to the next steps of the project and have started to discuss overall deliverables as well as objectives. Our next steps are to finish transcribing the remainder of the interviews and begin coding them for key themes and objectives. This will help us prepare for our upcoming control group. What We Observed and Learned Through editing transcriptions of recorded interviews, we noticed some very common themes that arose, even given the diverse backgrounds of the interviewee’s and their own personal journey navigating the pandemic and the recent environmental hazards. Many of the stories being told talked about the declining mental health of the interviewee’s and of the people in their communities and families. These mental health issues had to do with various factors, including losing jobs, financial stress, social isolation due to social distancing measures, language barriers, and added stress from taking care of children and family members. There was also an emphasis being placed on lack of information for underserved communities about the pandemic and resources for families that need help. Not only has it been challenging to find information that is reliable and credible for many of the interviewee’s, but the language barrier that many in the Bay Area face has prevented some of the interviewee’s from being able to understand important information regarding their health and safety. While these interviews all provided some common information about how people are navigating the pandemic, it is important to consider the unique situations that these people find themselves in to ensure that no group is left behind when planning for how to better prepare these communities in the future for catastrophic events beyond the current pandemic. Critical Analysis and Connection to Class Topics This week's reading and discussion seemed particularly connected to our group’s project. Two key themes that were present in both have been inclusion of diverse groups as well as oral histories. Our project has been primarily focused on interviews- each interviewee is different, with a different background and unique experience with both COVID-19 as well as climate change. This has allowed us to begin to understand the large variety of situations as well as the disparity of consequences in different communities. The Greenberg reading “What on Earth is Sustainability?” really captured a key theme of environmental justice which is sustainability for all. Listening to these interviews has allowed us to understand how sustainability in the Bay Area is not just exclusive, but is also harmful to certain communities. It has been a privilege to be engaged in recording the oral histories of these communities, as talked about in the reading by Baylor University. Being able to capture the feelings of different people and recognizing their personal experiences as a part of this bigger history has been very fulfilling and we are all excited to continue to learn more from them and to continue to develop our ideas of what it means to be inclusive in the pursuit of sustainability. |
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