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. Comments are closed.
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