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. Comments are closed.
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