Description
This course offers first-hand lessons in urban inequality, neighborhood organizing, economic development, and other issues that you may have studied elsewhere in more conventional classroom settings. Our assignments, lectures, readings, and guest speakers this semester revolve almost entirely around one case-study project: a needs-assessment study for Center of the Square, a recently incorporated nonprofit that serves the Clinton Elementary School catchment area in the Southside of the City of Poughkeepsie. Using an evaluation research design, the course will partner with the Center to develop and administer a survey of residents in a 10+ block area of the Southside and deliver a report of our findings which the Center will use to improve its current social-service programs and develop new ones.
Since this project promises an extraordinary amount of fieldwork and applied research, the course replaces the usual classroom procedures and requirements with a more hands-on "proseminar" format. After the first two weeks of class, we begin spending one of our two weekly meetings in the field conducting class tours and individual fieldwork; for these sessions, students will not "show up for class" in the usual sense. The other weekly meeting will be devoted to presenting and discussing our on-going research, developing and revising our methodology, discussing relevant literature and issues, and doing other classroom work toward our final goal: a final report to be written by the entire class.
Objectives for the course are: (1) to study the promises and problems of community development as they occur in real social settings through our course case study, (2) to learn and practice participant-observation, survey, and interview methods as well as research strategies in organizational evaluation and local collaboration, and (3) to evaluate critically and practically the ways that social researchers study and advance community well-being.
The needs-assessment study
Roughly speaking, our course project will involve four components:
| First, to identify the specific goals for the needs-assessment study, we will interview Center stakeholders (its directors, donors, school officials, neighborhood representatives, and others) and absorb prior reports the Center has commissioned. |
| Second, to assess how effectively the Center currently does its work, we will observe the organization in action, volunteer in its social-service programs – this semester, Climb the Beanstalk (an after-school program for first-graders) and Conocer (a cultural orientation program for Spanish-speaking immigrants) – and investigate the broader organizational/urban/political environment that the Center works in. |
| Third, we will integrate our preliminary analysis with the Center’s specific concerns to develop a residential survey that we will administer door-to-door in the Center’s neighborhood. |
| Finally, we will analyze the survey findings and present our analysis and proposals in a final report that the class will collectively write. |
Research teams
Students will perform most of the research and analysis in 3-person research teams. Each week, these teams will be assigned particular topics to research, write up, and present to the class by the following week. Team members are welcome to share or divide the following tasks among themselves as they choose, so long as the work gets done to the class’s satisfaction:
Research tasks will vary according to each week’s topics, but they can include observing field sites, participating in Center programs and other activities, doing historical-archival research, analyzing ethnographic documents, reviewing existing research and secondary data, conducting interviews, and taking photos.
Writing consists of generating at least 2000 words (roughly 5 pages) of field notes and posting them to Blackboard by Monday 5:00 pm of the following week. Field notes should emphasize thorough and thick description of observations and activities; for interviews, they should include as much verbatim quotation as possible. Field notes should also include original photos, whenever taking pictures of the field is possible and appropriate. We will discuss and practice taking field notes throughout the course; suffice it to say that our field notes will comprise a vital source of data that we will refer to and quote from in our final report. Therefore, whatever your team investigates or observes each week must be detailed in depth in your Blackboard post so that it can be preserved “for the record.”
Presentations will take place on the first in-class meeting each week. Each team will take 5-10 minutes to summarize their research and do a little show-and-tell with photos from the field, organizational documents, websites, and other relevant artifacts. Most importantly, teams will (a) present their running hypotheses of how their research addresses the questions of the needs-assessment study and (b) propose topics and issues for further study by the class.
Each week one team will rotate as the study’s project coordinators, who will work closely with the instructor to ensure that the study is on track and has addressed questions of methodological reliability and validity. The project coordinators’ tasks include consulting the methods literature to help design the study, compiling the running hypotheses and questions for further study from the Blackboard posts and classroom discussions, and helping the instructor organize the following week’s topics for team assignment. Additionally, the research team will advise the instructor on how to evaluate the other teams’ work for the week.
Each team will have its own group site on Blackboard that only team members and the instructor can access. The instructor will give instructions and advice to each team here; any questions to or follow-up with the instructor should be posted here (so that the other members can share the conversation). Also, teams can use this site to correspond with each other about logistics, share online resources, and exchange writing-in-progress. However, the final version of each team’s weekly field notes should be posted to the class-wide Blackboard forums.
Individual responsibilities
Participation: As individuals, you also have several tasks crucial to the success of the study and the class. Each week, students will read all the teams’ field notes as well as assigned readings from textbooks and articles. Each student will then post a weekly question, comment, or response on Blackboard that addresses issues of the study: running hypotheses, questions for further study, issues of research method or ethics, or suggestions to refine the study or class process.
Survey administration: In the second half of the semester, each student will have a certain number of questionnaires to administer door-to-door in the Center in the Square jurisdiction (the Clinton School catchment area). You will be responsible for knocking on the doors of your assigned households, trying again at least once if you get no response, and accurately entering your data into a classwide survey database.
Individual research: After the second week of class, students will conduct individual fieldwork and write a 3-5 page report. Once the survey data are completely gathered (around the next-to-last week of the semester), students will be responsible for analyzing and reporting on survey findings for particular variables. In the last week of classes, students will write analytical essays on selected topics (to be assigned later) that will be compiled into the final report.
At the end of the course, students will turn in a final essay of 5-8 pages length on how they have come to understand the problems and solutions of community development in Poughkeepsie.