Update on Project Activities
This week was also spent canvassing. Each group tried to diversify times in order to get a different response crowd. Michelle & Shikha: We plan on doing our canvassing shift this Saturday afternoon. We will be using two iPads and interviewing in the same area of Menlo Park (businesses along the Santa Cruz and El Camino intersection) as there were many small businesses whose managers and workers we didn’t reach in our last shift. A Saturday may have more foot traffic and constant streams of businesses, but it may not have a “peak” crowded time, so going back and forth between businesses will be easier. We plan to go back to two of our interviewees to get some first-person details about their ability to live and/or work near Menlo Park. We may also consider getting some responses from families who live in the area, as understanding what Menlo Park wants is also crucial. Yesenia & Sarah: We went canvassing along Santa Cruz Ave on Thursday, Nov 1 at about 1:40 pm. We split up because Sarah had the only iPad that was charged. Yesenia collected one last paper survey that was left during the previous canvassing round. Yesenia then decided to charge the iPad in a Starbucks, while Sarah finished her shift at about 2:30 pm. Yesenia continue surveying from 3:15 to 4:15 pm. She was only able to get one survey response as many store workers were either i) occupied with customers ii) talking with each other iii) didn’t feel comfortable filling out the survey while on the job. Sarah was able to collect around 7 surveys total, but realized that there was an influx of people from work/school who started to populate the area around 2pm. Next week, Sarah will be interviewing the people of Bow Wow Meow, whose owner has graciously agreed to have the workers in-shop next Thursday fill out the form, with the potential of a spoken testimony. Katie & Justin: We went canvassing along Santa Cruz Avenue Thursday, November 1st around 8:00 to 9:30 pm. We went as a pair since Katie had a hot spot on her phone and Justin needed to use it to administer the surveys as well. Our goal was to focus on restaurants and businesses that were winding down at this hour. In total we got under 10 surveys. We mostly wanted to experiment with alternative times to avoid major rushes. We surveyed Juban, a Japanese restaurant, Baskin Robins, and Walgreens, but had trouble getting ahold of folks who were busy working in the kitchen. We left surveys at Subway and an ice cream parlor. Katie administered surveys through the iPad and Justin administered surveys through an iPad and paper (when out of range from Katie’s hotspot). What We Observed and Learned In terms of connecting our work to the class readings, urban agriculture is not within the scope of our project. However, the idea of urban resilience brought up the idea of community trust and social capital, which is valuable to Menlo Park. When surveying managers in Menlo Park, many showed pride in their businesses and providing for their clientele, despite their complaints about the housing and transportation issues needed to get to the area. The downtown culture of Menlo Park may add to community familiarity, which may have this converse effect of not wanting to create seemingly drastic but necessary changes to downtown that accommodate more workers. There could be some extrapolations between urban resilience and transportation as well. Looking at the “organizational perspective,” a key factor of a well-operating system is one that takes into account public attitudes. Although it could still use more traction, public transport is integrated in the norm of Bay Area communities more than in other California communities, such as the Central Valley or Los Angeles. It’s also a topic of advocacy for TransForm, Friends of Caltrain, and other non-governmental agencies. Creating more accessible public transport therefore fits within social constructs of Bay Area workers and has the mixed use of governmental maintenance and NGO oversight. Our project directly ties into framing the need for improved public transportation, which operates within a resilient organizational framework. Michelle & Shikha: We have no new findings to report this week yet in terms of surveying, but will add our next shifts to next week’s reflection. Yesenia & Sarah: iPads are finicky! Yesenia ran into trouble with charging her iPad, which meant she had to recharge at the local Starbucks while Sarah canvassed. We also have found that people are less inclined to fill out a survey on an iPad due to the small font, hard accessibility for older people, and proximity of interviewers to them while they fill it out. Next week we will retry the paper copies, so that the people who want privacy when filling it out can do so. Since Yesenia had to charge her iPad, she canvassed from 3:15-4:15, which is not a good time because that is peak time for people getting out of work/school to go into Downtown Menlo Park for coffee/food/other goods. Katie & Justin * 8pm-10pm is actually a really difficult shift to do because most businesses are closed and many restaurants are in the process of closing up, thus are not interested in doing surveys (they probably want to go home). For those we were able to talk, we sensed a fatigued tone (in strict contrast to the enthusiasm expressed by people earlier in the day). Not only does this make people less likely to open up personally, but it also could reflect poorly on our study as people view responding as more of a chore. * We did not receive much verbal feedback. Nobody would be potential candidates for testimonies. * We need to print out more spanish speaking surveys/develop an approach that is inclusive of spanish speaking workers who work in the kitchen * Big box stores like Trader Joe's and Walgreens are easier to canvass, but we need to develop solutions to allow for our survey to reach a wide scope of audience. * Some restaurants told us to come back later after people left. When we came back, they would be closed. At first we thought that there was an elusive window just before official closing, but upon further inspection, this window does not really exist, as businesses really start the process of shutting down before they officially close, and have no desire to take an optional survey. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward We look forward to our final week of data collection. Our community partners have expressed quality interactions and data over a fixed number of surveys, though we still hope to get close to our original goal of 100 surveys. We will meet at the end of next week to review conclusions and move into a focused analysis face, though we’ve had preliminary discussions about our conclusions thus far. When we (Katie and Justin) were canvassing, we realized that restaurants in the downtown area like Chef Kwan’s had many workers but because of the fast paced work environment, asking workers, even for just 5 minutes, to fill out the survey was not realistic. We recognize that we cannot interfere with workers’ job duties. Restaurants like these would be better for dropping off a stack of paper surveys and collecting later (even if this has a lower response rate). Stores like Walgreens and Trader Joe’s have more worker flexibility. Katie and Justin plan to go back to Trader Joe’s at night to survey the night shift (before closing). Katie and Justin went to a Chinese restaurant around 9:20. Despite having a large workforce and no customers in the restaurant, the manager did not want us surveying. Katie pointed out afterwards that this response may arise from different cultural beliefs on what is expected at work. Katie spoke with her and dropping off paper surveys may be a possibility. I know from personal experience what it is like to be working late and having to close up. Workers are not happy to see people come in just before closing because it means that it will take longer to finish. There is really no reason for them to stay to answer an optional survey. People may be more than unenthused about helping, but may be actively resentful towards us because they see us as preventing them from getting home on time after a long day, which can fuel deep personal feelings (which challenges our integrity as researchers). In contrast, when going in the middle of the day between rushes, workers have more disposable time, and in fact may want to help. Looking forward to our goal of 100 surveys, we hope to survey about 50 people this upcoming week. This means that each pair has to survey 17 people at least. Using what we learned from our trouble finding available workers to survey this week, we are optimistic that we can achieve this goal by changing our canvassing times to earlier, yet less busy hours. Update on Project Activities
This week our team moved forward to the survey process of our project. Katie worked on creating a design for the paper versions of the survey and Michelle created an online Google form document. Justin translated the survey into Spanish. Both paper and virtual surveys have both English and Spanish translations. The six of us have split off into pairs to maximize our team’s ability to reach out to different groups of people in Downtown Menlo Park. The last few weeks have been focused on refining the language and content of the survey to make it understandable by a wide audience, while also generating usable data. The paper design of surveys was sent to community partners and the team for review, both for input on design and language. We had our canvassing training with Leora from HLCSM on Monday afternoon, and we were able to get tips, ask questions, and do role play to get us into the mindset. There were three survey shifts this week. Michelle, Shikha, Sarah, and Yesenia stayed mostly on Santa Cruz Avenue and El Camino and surveyed small businesses. Shikha and Michelle focused on businesses along the El Camino and Santa Cruz. Cross Section. They surveyed from 10:30 am to a little after noon on different days. Sarah and Yesenia surveyed Thursday 12:30-2pm right around the tail end of lunch rush hour. Justin and Katie originally planned to do a late night survey around 9 pm on Thursday to reach out to workers who work in a restaurant. However, Katie’s car battery was dead and they were unable to conduct that shift. They are making plans for doing a late night shift next week, in order to catch workers during off hours. This morning, Justin and Katie went to Trader Joe’s. They found that this was a good time to go for grocery stores since there weren’t too many people shopping and many of the workers were doing inventory and stocking, which is much easier to take a few minutes for the survey, as opposed to the workers at checkout. We also had a debrief meeting this Friday to discuss our survey experiences with our community partners. Leora and Adina from Friends of Caltrain were present in person, and Chris phoned in. What We Observed and Learned Before beginning our canvassing, our biggest challenge was preparing the survey. We found it difficult to cut questions to shorten the survey and had to test the language of our survey with friends and service workers on campus to ensure it was clear. Each member of the group tested the survey with at least one person on campus and found no major difficulties. We then moved the survey to a digital format on Google Forms. We ran into technical difficulties with the iPad, especially with viewing permissions and getting internet connection on the go. We learned that a good solution was to create an easy to remember bit.ly link and tether from our phones while surveying. We also learned about canvassing through a training on Monday with Leora, one of our community partners. We watched training videos and prepared introduction speeches. One of our biggest learnings were: * Dress in friendly, approachable clothing. Don’t be too professional, don’t carry a clipboard. Smile and make eye contact. * Don’t open with your name and introduction. Instead, go straight to the point with the ask. Leora emphasized that we should say that we are Stanford students (not researchers) to make people more willing to help us. * When introducing the project, offer the iPad to the person. Once they take the iPad in their hands, there’s a high chance they will take the survey. Leora was a huge help in making us feel more comfortable and prepared to canvas. Afterward, we each chose areas and days to survey in pairs and set out. Below, we will discuss learnings from each survey shift. Michelle and Shikha: This pair surveyed small businesses on El Camino Real including McDonald's, Mattress Firm, a hair salon, and a bookstore. Like other groups, we found that most employees were quite willing to talk. However, employees tended to defer to their managers for permission first. Restaurants were difficult because they had constant streams of customers, even around 11 am, when we went. We had more success with smaller businesses, who had 1-2 employees and were willing to have long conversations. There also seemed to be a wait time often to talk to managers or catch the employees at a good time, so we only surveyed around 5-6 people in a 1.5 hour period of time. Each survey takes closer to 3-4 minutes, but it can be close to a 10-minute process for us to engage them, make conversation, have them take the survey, and move to the next business. Our findings showed that 3-4 of our respondents came from Redwood City, whose prices are much more affordable than Menlo Park. We got a few star interviewees who could be great to capture stories from. One was the owner of Feldman’s Bookstore, who has lived in the Bay Area his whole life. He has owned his bookstore since 1996 and has seen online bookstores cut into his margins. He feels lucky to have inherited a home from his parents, but wouldn’t be able to live downtown if not. He had a lot of great insight on how the Bay Area has changed and why people aren’t able to use public transit reliably. Another was a manager of Mattress Firm, who has lived in the Bay Area for about 10 years. He had a lot to say about transportation. He doesn’t trust public transit because it’s unreliable and there are few first mile/last mile connections from his home in San Jose. So he drives his car 45 minutes each way. We also heard from multiple businesses about land use issues - how small businesses don’t always have a say in their landlords’ decisions about what to do about building renovations. For example, renters of business spaces receive no compensation if the city buys the building from the landlord to tear it down. Yesenia and Sarah: This pair surveyed small business and a fast food chain, on Santa Cruz Ave between University Dr and El Camino Real between 1-2 pm. We found workers very open to having a conversation, especially since it was after the lunch hour rush. This could also be because it was a Thursday, and most businesses do not have a large amount of flux on weekday afternoons. While there weren’t that many customers in the stores, some workers/owners preferred to fill out the survey later rather than on the spot. We will explore other options of getting them to fill them on the spot, either by changing our canvassing pitch or offering the iPad for them to fill out the survey right away, so to avoid having to return to businesses to pick up surveys. We learned a lot through experiencing first hand canvassing in Menlo Park. Again, we found that many people are willing to talk, which really helps our project and what we are trying to achieve as we wish to collect testimonials. By introducing ourselves as Stanford students, it seemed that business owners and workers were more open to talking and had a positive attitude about our work. Stanford has a reputation for being a prestigious institution so using this affiliation may have been one of the reasons that made people confide in our intellectual abilities, respect us, and wish to know how they could get involved. By the end of our shift, we had given 13 surveys, partially filled out in person, and partially to be picked up this weekend. One of the people we spoke to wanted to know what the data was being used for, and after we explained that part of the project is writing a small brief for Menlo Park City Council, they launched into other ideas for ways they want Menlo Park to change for their individual services. Since that is not a part of our group’s breadth in our survey, it was sometimes difficult to find the language to tell them that we were not a direct line to City Council and that their proposals were not a part of our survey goals. For instance, one woman who has lived in Menlo Park for 40 years wanted us to talk to City Council about allocating the center of the parking lot for cars with permits. She became very passionate and entered into a tangent, to which we could only tell her that her voice matters and that we will include her sentiments in our deliverables, but that this probably isn’t going to be the focus of our appeals. Another observation was that non-commuters were more reluctant to fill out survey; one woman said “I’m not the voice you wanna hear from”. We feel like it is important to get data from all of the workers so as to not have bias data, so we told them, “your input still would really help our research”. Katie and Justin: This pair went to Trader Joe's in Menlo Park and got a total of 13 responses for an hour of recording. Justin also talked to someone who was interested in participating further and providing a story for us to record and share. * When surveying grocery stores, we found that it was difficult to find a time to survey people who were working checkout. A nice thing to do is to offer to help bag while they filled out the survey. * iPad worked great. We liked that people could fill out the survey on the spot. * One particularly vocal worker, who we plan to contact again for a testimony, described city council about not treating low income workers “as human beings,” and only caring about the rich who can cash the checks. He is 44 years-old living with his parents in East Palo Alto, who have had the house for 30 years. He says the only way that people are able to live in the area is if they have 14 roommates. He does not have children, and does not know how people can raise children in this area. * I gave a survey to one of the employees. In describing what it was, a customer came up to me and asked to be part of the survey. She was very upset by how bad traffic was, and said that she generally does not even bother coming into Menlo Park because of the traffic. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Yesenia & Sarah: We went out Thursday afternoon from around 12:30-2pm. Unfortunately we hadn’t expected to have technological issues going into the canvassing, and had to rely on our paper copies of the questionnaire. That being said, we were able to get 12 surveys filled out, and we will be picking up some of them in the coming days. Looking forward, we are going to make sure that we have the google survey at hand on the iPad before we go into Menlo Park, but also keep the paper copies at hand for the people who want to fill them out after their business day is over. We learned that by making personal connections and presenting ourselves as Stanford students who were conducting an anonymous survey, most people found us very approachable and were willing to have long conversations with us. Our goal in the coming weeks of canvassing is to make sure that we continue our progress in talking to workers and business owners and hearing their opinions through using the iPads and paper copies of the survey as well as the spoken word. Due to technical difficulties and limited time, we did not try to get voice recordings from the people we interviewed. In the future, this will be a much bigger focus for the both of us. We expect to have much more streamlined survey outings in the coming weeks, as we will have the collective knowledge of our group members as well as our own experiences to go off of. Michelle & Shikha: Using an iPad definitely makes people more willing to fill the survey on the spot, so using two in a more crowded location should elicit quick responses. We need to be careful and make sure we are connected to wifi or a hotspot at all times, as we almost a lost a survey response when we were disconnected. In our experience, people did not find any questions difficult, and many would keep the conversation about their experiences, so we’d love to find a way to continue the momentum of their thoughts without stopping to clarify or take care of administrative waivers on our end. Our goal this week is to diversify our shift time and allow ourselves a longer period if possible/schedule permits. With our new documentation strategy, we can pick up on more of the comments people make. We’ve learnt so much more about the reality of transportation in these few conversations, and we are looking forward to understanding more in the coming weeks. One positive note is also how positively people are looking at our survey - many have thoughts and believe in the cause. Even if they aren’t interested in further advocacy or including their contact information, there’s a clear need, making our research relevant. As a group, we met with the community partners on Friday to update them on our work and findings. They gave us a few suggestions for improving canvassing: * Ask business owners if they have recruiting issues due to housing or transportation costs. This won’t be part of the survey but would be great stories to capture. * To improve story capturing, have one person in the pair take notes on quotes while people talk, while the other holds the conversation. * Bring waivers on spot and take photos of people who tell stories to avoid having to go back. * Look into different times like after dinner rush at restaurants starting around eight or nine. * Add a question of what time you usually leave for work to the survey (might indicate certain times of congestion/incentivize people to use certain forms of transport). * If people discuss issues outside of our scope, listen but indicate our inability to aid that situation in order to not promise or intend something that won’t happen Justin and Katie: Perhaps the most striking commonlity from all our surveys is how much people dislike traffic. As soon as we would mention traffic, the workers would immediately go off and want to tell us everything. Even though many of the people in this location did not have terrible commute times (as they were mostly minimum wage workers, who tend to live nearby their jobs), commuting is a very stressful task that affects a large swath of the Bay Area population. After our first session, we have a few improvements to faciliate the quality of the information and our effciency. First, we want to come back at the end the Trader Joe’s shift around 10pm. This would also be a less hectic time and would allow us to survey a different group of people. This venue is great because the manager was welcoming, there are low income workers, there are many employees in a single location (reducing travel time), and workers have a fair degree of flexibility: besides the checkers, workers were able to take a few minutes off to answer a few questions. In light of the opinions we received, we want a better mechanism to capture personal testimonies. Often times people make small comments. We want to write quotes down as they say them. The only difficulty in this is that by writing things down, it prevents us from connecting with the peopole as effectively (it makes us appear to be studying them, which can could be counterproductive). To be able to capture more of the data, we need to have photo release forms on hand so that we do not have to go back for footage. Update on Project Activities
Since we had our kickoff meeting with community partners last Friday, we were able to jump into our survey design this week. We met on Monday to split up work for survey questions, scope of work, and the reflection. We also talked about teaming norms and scheduling. We learned that our availabilities overlap best on Fridays and Tuesday afternoons (3-5pm), and after class is best for quick check-ins. We also created a calendar-format agenda to solidify our work for the next few weeks. We will be sharing this with our community partners so they can track our progress. Roughly, we will begin our canvassing/survey administration next week (end of week 4/beginning of week 5). To design the survey, we began by looking at previous surveys done by TransFORM (Chris Leppe), which were much longer than our target survey. The TransFORM survey also targeted a broader audience than ours, but was still useful for designing questions about transportation in general. We also independently looked at other transportation surveys conducted by groups like CTAA, Virginia’s DOT, and MIT. We then independently created lists of questions, which we compiled in a document throughout the week. We aimed to create them without consulting each other, so we could see where there were duplicate questions and overlaps of interest. On Friday, we met as a team without community partners to write a full first draft of our survey, plan our canvassing training with community partners, and further develop our scope of work. For the survey, we started by highlighting questions that others had written that we found interesting. We compiled these into a separate document. Then, we reworded and reformatted the questions to be similar to the TransFORM survey. Finally, we added demographic questions and open-ended questions. The survey is quite long -- it has 17 questions not including the open-ended responses -- but we wanted to send a more comprehensive list to the community partners so they can edit it down. We have sent the first draft of the survey to our community partners. They will edit it virtually, then have an in-person session with us next week to finalize it. We created separate surveys for employees and managers. Although employees are our main target audience, we want to see if employers or managers understand their employees’ transportation and housing issues, so we can better target our final messaging. The worker survey asks more about the individual’s transportation habits, while the employers’ survey asks more about their workers’ issues and the transportation incentives that they’d be willing to subsidize/support. What We Observed and Learned In class, we learned about the principles of effective and ethical service. This is important for us to keep in mind as we’re only contributing to a small part of the larger transportation and housing affordability problem. We’re entering as outsiders who have (for the most part) never canvassed before. Here are some concrete ways that we addressed this:
Another thing we are learning is that managing schedules with so many people is difficult. Our community partners, as they come from three different organizations, have very different availabilities. Originally, we aimed to hold our survey review and canvassing training all next Friday. However, Chris and Adina had conflicts come up. We realized that there were no time spans during the week that all of our team members could meet for long enough to run both the survey review and the training, so we decided to split up the two. Leora will run the canvassing training, and Chris/Adina will lead the survey review with us. We had to manage our wording to be clear and inclusive. We’re learning a lot about managing client relationships and conflicting schedules, and have been excited by how great our community partners have been in terms of flexibility and letting us set our own agenda. Lastly, we learned about phrasing questions effectively. Generally, the goal provided by our community partners was to understand if workers who commute into Menlo Park would want to live closer to work, and what their barriers are if so. We aimed to make our questions unambiguous, quantifiable for the most part, and objective. As an example, we started with a question: “are you able to get to work using public transit with minimal walking?” We thought that “minimal walking” may be ambiguous, so we worked to better define it in terms of numbers -- minutes to walk. Our next iteration was “How long would you have to walk to get from your house to the nearest public transit station (bus, Caltrain, MUNI, etc.)?” Another example is the question, “how do you get to work?” We thought this could be too open-ended and wanted to make it multiple choice, to ease analysis. Instead, we changed the question to: “What mode of transport do you use for your commute to work? (Circle multiple if they apply)” and made multiple choice responses such as “car (driving alone)”, “car (with at least one other person)”, “bus”, “rail service/caltrain”, etc. This is still a work in progress. We’re not sure if, as people who don’t commute regularly around the Bay Area, we might be missing some important questions. Maybe our perception of a typical commute and popular modes of transit is skewed. Maybe, when we ask about transportation subsidies they would be interested in, we’re missing discussion of other important initiatives. Maybe our wording on some of our “agree/disagree” questions is biased. We’ve heavily workshopped our questions already, but know it will still require further development. That is why we will work with our community partners, who have experience conducting surveys, to discuss multiple vantage points and include any missing, pivotal questions. We also hope to combat this by launching a literature review. We want to review at least 5-10 sources about housing and transportation issues in the Bay Area, to ensure that we’re considering all perspectives and initiatives. We will provide update on this in the coming weeks as we wish to have input by the community partners on this idea. Again, we want to make sure we are adhering to the principles of ethical and effective service, outlined by the Haas center, by including our community partners in our decisions. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Deland challenged us to think earlier this week about who are the members of the “community” that we are working for, what do we know about them, and what can we learn from them. It is critical to remain aware of the community we are working with so that we can ensure that our work is actually meaningful and has the potential to create wanted impact. Although “Menlo Park” is in the title of our community partner project, we recognize that there will be many people coming from different communities throughout the Bay Area. These communities will vary in demographics including race, ethnicity, median income, profession, distance away from Menlo Park, etc. Menlo Park is a very wealthy area, yet the people we will be interviewing will often have blue collar jobs and may not earn enough to afford living in such an expensive area. We believe our “community” will be comprised of people who travel far distances to get to work, and who may be allotting a sizeable percentage of their income to transportation, as the community partner reading on Palo Alto Transportation indicated. We believe that historically there has been a lack of access to public transportation for workers in areas such as Palo Alto and Menlo Park, but we acknowledge that these are expectations that should not be reflected in our survey questions. We posed questions on our survey that would allow us to get to know the “community” we are working for better by seeing how far they work from their homes, what methods of transportation they take, how much they spend on transportation, etc. We were careful in how we phrased questions, as aforementioned, to leave our expectations out and get honest, accurate answers. Again, we wish to access the level of need for more public transportation, not try to prove that it exists because then that would skew our data. Once we analyze our data, and find that there is a need (or not), hopefully even more data can be collected to form a case that can be presented to the Menlo Park City Council by our community partner. Looking forward, we have a few meetings and deliverables for next week. First, we will have a group meeting on Tuesday afternoon to review the Scope of Work and prepare for our midterm presentation. We think that meeting regularly throughout the week like this will keep us on track (last week it was Monday, this week Tuesday works better because we have a longer chunk of time). Before that meeting, the team will finalize our portions of the written scope of work and slides, and work to get our sections down to 2 mins of speaking time. Additionally, we will be scheduling two meetings with community partners. First, we want an in-person survey review with Adina and Chris, and Leora if she is available. We sent some proposed times to the partners and look forward to hearing their response. To prepare for this, we will review any digital feedback from the partners and make those changes before the meeting. A few questions we have on the survey are: what are transit incentives that we should consider? How can we ensure that our questions are unbiased? How can we make our survey as low-effort yet honest as possible? Is our survey for managers asking the right questions, or should it be more similar to the employee survey? The second meeting will be canvassing training with Leora, where she will teach us how to conduct door-to-door surveys in Menlo Park. We look forward to learning from her, most likely on Friday. After this, we will pair up and create a canvassing plan to ensure we hit our 100-survey goal. Some of our concerns here include: how do we reach commuting workers door-to-door if they don’t live in Menlo Park? Should we contact employers before coming to their place of work? How long should our survey be to receive the best response? What format should we deliver the survey in (paper or iPad, maybe)? What are the best times to canvass? How do we introduce ourselves to appear approachable? What should the street boundaries we target be, if any? Should we be taking pictures or videos on the spot? We will also, as mentioned above, start our literature review. Katie will be spearheading this, but we will all contribute, and try to draw resources from the class and community partners if possible. Update on Project Activities
This Monday, we met with members from our community partners: Friends of Caltrain, Transform, and the Housing Leadership Council of San Mateo County. During our meeting, we got acquainted with one another and got a better idea of what we will be working on the for the quarter. To further our knowledge of the issues our community partners are taking on, we did the proposed readings specific to our project. These included housing reports from Legislative Affairs Office, the general plan for the Menlo Park downtown area, and UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Projects. After parsing through the documents, we all had a much better understanding of the affordable housing in the Bay Area and how it connects to transportation. These former studies are useful to our project because they provide background information on housing and transportation in the Bay Area, as well as highlight the gaps in the research that our project could expand upon. On Friday, October 5, we had a second meeting with the community partners to discuss scope of work. We discussed our target audience, goals, types of questions to ask, and potential outcomes. We also set a broad timeline for the rest of the quarter: 1 week for survey design, 3-4 weeks for survey collection, and 3-4 weeks for analysis and preparing deliverables. Leora, one of the community partners, will lead a training on canvassing and workshop our survey with us in two weeks. More detail in the section below. What We Observed and Learned Through our Monday meeting with partners and in-class activities, we have had the ability to learn technical knowledge in the form of lectures and readings and see plans that have had varying degrees of success put into action. This is an invaluable platform for us to start out on, and will provide a great base for us to build off of in the coming weeks. Our meeting on Monday helped us take baby steps in interacting with community partners and asking them questions about what they have been working on. Our Friday planning meeting helped clarify our goals and deliverables:
There seems to be some flexibility for us to define our goals and deliverables, so an important next step is to outline our scope of work for the rest of the quarter and design the survey. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward One major goal of our group contribute meaningfully to the pursuit of creating more affordable housing options. Our partners have communicated that they need help with collecting metrics and stories by going door to door to homes in Menlo Park. The group as a whole has little exposure to surveying, especially at the scale that we are conducting ours. This experience provides a unique opportunity to empathize with people in real life, and transcend the boundaries of the classroom. As the brunt of our research consists of surveys of the community, it is important that we maintain proper respect. We recognize that people, ourselves included, have little desire to help surveyors. Surveying can prove challenging as people are often busy, and may take their impatience out on the surveyor. Our community partners point out that it is necessary to be enthusiastic and recognize when people are busy (for example, we should avoid interviewing employees at a restaurant during major meal times). They also recommended that we say that we are conducting research from Stanford University, as people in the community tend to be more inclined to help local students, as well as to be a part of academic research. Because statistics can be generated to support any position, as researchers, it is necessary that we conduct fair surveys. This means that our surveys should be representative of the population in question. This may be challenging as we predict that there will be a large nonresponse bias, which may lead us to only receive data from people with extreme perspectives. This may lead us to avoid certain platforms such as internet surveys, which have very low response rates, according to our community partners. Second, to conduct representative samples, our community partners highlight that we want to survey business owners and employees alike, as they both present a worthy perspective. Through the surveys, we hope to hear the voices that general statistics cannot reflect. We also hope to include ways of bringing into account the experiences of marginalized communities, if applicable. In some cases, it may be useful to record (with permission) an interviewee’s testimony, even if we cannot quantify the response. This representation is important because, as the Greenberg paper reflects, we want sustainable policy with the people in mind, and not a “strategic branding device.” Moving forward as a group, the hardest problem will be coordinating meeting times, as we all have very full schedules that overlap. We may be available to meet all together at lunch, though this may not always be possible, and so we may have to meet over conference call. While conducting the research, we will not have to coordinate our schedules. Some immediate next steps include setting regular meeting times, designing the survey, and taking canvassing training. We plan to meet after class on Monday to set team norms, contribute digitally to a list of survey questions throughout the week, then have an in-person survey work day on Friday (10/12). We will send our survey draft to the community partners on Saturday (10/13). The next Friday (10/19), we will meet with the community partners in person again for canvassing training, led by Leora, and another revision of our survey. We look forward to learning about canvassing and survey design. Assessing Future Housing and Transportation Patterns in the City of Palo Alto | Week 9 Reflection12/1/2017
Current Progress:
This week, our group met with Adina and Elaine to discuss the first draft of our paper. This was our last in-person meeting with our stakeholders, excluding the oral presentation on Wednesday. Overall, they were impressed with our first efforts and gave us some insightful comments to refine the paper. We finished the Faces of Palo Alto project and are now entirely focused on the research paper. However, we are struggling to articulate the research in a coherent manner. There is a lot of jargon we are unfamiliar with, and are therefore relying on input from our stakeholders. If we complete a draft in the next few days, we may even be able to ask Hillary Gitelman for feedback. As for the data, we were told to isolate demographic groups by locality and employment. Adina and Elaine are interested in people’s shifting housing/transportation preferences as you move outward from Palo Alto. In response to these requests, we designed a commuter map showing the housing and workplace distribution of local and non-local workers. Next Steps: Our team will submit a second draft paper to Adina and Elaine early next week. Hopefully, we will receive comments prior to the oral presentation in order to make last minute changes as needed. We will complete the final paper by the end of dead week. As for the presentation, our group is meeting for two hours this Saturday to fix slides and rehearse. Lastly, we will submit a google doc containing all of our data and methods to Deland, Adina, and Elaine this coming week. Issues and Discussion: The online surveys did not contribute valuable data to our research project. Unfortunately, our group released the editing form rather than the survey itself. As a result, we had to resend the survey later than anticipated and only collected nine surveys. Though we appreciated the 10% increase in data, our results did not change significantly. We cannot say for sure how this impacts the bias of our research. However, an online demographic would have expanded our sample set, and likely provided a younger age pool. We received numerous comments regarding the connectivity of public transit in Palo Alto. Similar to bus schedules, transit connectivity is apparently difficult to access. People would be more willing to commute via public transit with more knowledge and assurance about the system itself. In our last meeting, we discussed the influence of smartphone technology on the reliability of using public transit. An interesting research project for future students could observe the value in certain apps and websites for public transit users. The hypothesis being that there may be a correlation between rider satisfaction and smartphone usage. This can trace back to cultural and economic inequalities. Do public transit systems favor smartphone owners, increasing the potential cost of the consumer to reliably travel? We believe that the improvements to both transit systems and people’s understanding of the systems will result in higher rider densities. Considering next steps, a future research group may consider conducting research to identify solutions to our observed housing and transportation findings. An economic assessment of housing projects aimed at increasing a local working class could be valuable. However, any research concerning housing projects should also summarize Palo Alto zoning policies to identify which housing projects are actually feasible. Shifting from data driven research to large scale implementation will require an interdisciplinary approach and a diverse project team. As we discovered, the more input a team uses the more beneficial the project can be to society. Input can come from consultants, professors, policy makers, and local residents. We are excited to share our work with all of you this coming week. The class has been a valuable learning experience, and we wanted to thank Adina and Elaine for all the help. |
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