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! Comments are closed.
|
Archives
November 2020
Categories
All
|