Update on Project Activities
This week our team has been working diligently to continue our data analysis and begin drafting up our final report. We’ve assigned specific data responsibilities and sections of the final report to each team member and have been doing a pretty good job keeping everyone accountable. Katherine, Andea, and Brian are taking the lead on the quantitative data analysis using excel, stata, and tableau. For every demographic, Katherine is creating pie charts and tables that will show response frequencies and the results from different data analysis tests. Andea is working on Tableau to create bar graph visualizations representing different survey questions disaggregated by race, gender, homeownership status, age, and employment status. Brian is also compiling pie charts for all survey respondents in regard to questions about climate change concern and awareness. Steven is taking the lead on analyzing the qualitative data from the survey which mainly consist of text answers to open-ended questions. He’s developed a python script that will parse out the most commonly used words and phrases in the responses and representing the responses in a bar graph. He’s also developed a word cloud representation of the responses that is both insightful and aesthetically pleasing. Jessica is working on a spatial analysis of the survey data using GIS. She has so far been able to match survey addresses to East Palo Alto parcels and map out the geographic distribution of survey respondents across EPA. She has had the support of Derek in obtaining GIS data such as parcels, EPA boundary map, and FEMA flood zone area. Her first GIS analysis was to map responses to the survey question, “Is your property in a FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area?” and contrast the answers to the actual flood zone. Through this analysis we found that a good amount of people living in a FEMA flood zone are aware of it, but there are also a handful that are not. In terms of the final report, Jessica and Katherine have started drafting up the background information and introduction as well as methodology. Brian and Steven will be in charge of the literature review and they have already found a few useful sources from Derek’s previous projects. What We Observed and Learned This week in class we have been learning about transportation systems in the Bay Area and Stanford’s own transportation demand management system. We got to take a bike tour around the campus to visit different bike infrastructure as well as the Marguerite bus lot. It was really cool to see Stanford incorporating climate-friendly transportation (via electric Marguerite busses), but it reminded us that East Palo Alto is largely lacking in sustainable transportation infrastructure in comparison. We were reminded of the importance of our work in encouraging policymakers to bring similar changes to East Palo Alto. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward The next week is expected to be as productive, if not more productive than this week. Data analysis is expected to be finished, as well as the methodology section of our final report. Something that we’ve already begun discussing is how we want the layout of the graphs/tables/pie charts to be on the final report, but by next week we are hoping to finalize a template with which to input our data analyses and begin our interpretation on. By the end of next week, we want to have made significant progress in our report, and make leeway on our final one-page deliverable for the East Palo Alto residents. As it has already been stated, data analysis is still to be completed, however, there are some findings that should be brought to attention. Current GIS mapping shows that residents aren’t completely sure whether they do or not not reside in a flood zone area. For those that do know that they reside in a flood zone area, they aren’t completely sure whether they do or do not have flood insurance. Analysis concerning concern shows that overall, most residents are concerned about climate change yet they aren’t well versed in the topic. After being presented with related information, initial concern changes, areas that aren’t climate change related show a drop in concern while concern regarding climate change increases. Our findings presented in our final report will show the relationship that exists between the residents of the East Palo Alto area and their concerns as well as current risks due to ongoing climate change. These relationships will be combined with the thoughts of the community in order for one to be able to fully understand what the statistics mean given the context of the community. This understanding will allow decision makers to know where to direct and focus their attention and efforts to in order to effectively initiate actions to combat climate change and engage the community. Combining statistics and thoughts allows for our report to truly be the voice of the community and is why a one-page deliverable as well as a thorough and robust report is being created. The one-page deliverable allows the team to concisely present all findings but more importantly, it allows the team to inform the East Palo Alto community where the community as a whole stands. Also, it allows those who participated in the surveying phase of the project to directly see how their contribution helped shape the end result. Comments are closed.
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