Finishing up

This past week has been very difficult in terms of the amount of work and pulliong all of my research into the ARP and then formatting it in a way that made sense logically and was easy to read as well as to understand. Cleaning up surveys, observations, and interview results, particularly the coded results,was difficult becuase a certain amount of discretion goes into coding all of these and deciding what to include and what to leave out; what's meaningful and what's not. The final ARP, including appendix, is nearly 30 pages which is one of the longest papers I've ever written though I feel a great sense of satisfaction at having completed such a large scale project. The multi-modals were a great addition to this project and forced me to consider my research from new and interesting angles which I had previously left unexmained. Overall I am satisfied with my work and I feel like I learned a lot while working on this project.

The results...

After collecting all of the survey, interview, and observation results, I'm now trying to sort and make sense of them. I interviewed four people and surveyed sixteen and there weren't really any results that I found too shocking. The trouble is in trying to find an interesting angle with which to frame the results; trying to make the results seem interesting and meaningful in some novel way. To this end I've been continuing text-based research, trying to find previous research that stands starkly against the results of mine, but so far I've yet to find anything significant. I'm still looking though...

The Survey

After completing my interview questions, I went about trying to formulate survey questions. Survey questions seem considerably harder because there is another dimension to consider: the response and how to quantify it. So I ended up kind of distilling my original interview questions into a small set of easily quantifiable survey items and am quite happy with the result. As far as research goes, I'm still very much in the text-based research stage, which basically means I've been combing through lots and lots of academic journal articles covering a broad range of topics which are of interest to my project. Lately I've noticed that there are lots of great political science resources on google, and I've been trying to use them to spark new ideas and to give me a new and fresh way of looking at my project and its ultimate goals or ambitions.

Here is my survey.

Starting Research

I've began pouring through academic articles in search of research material for my project. I found a semi-annual publication that published academic journal articles called "Annual Edition: Global Issues" which has proven to a be a valuable source of information to me. I find myself skimming through material at first, then, when something catches my eye, I'll begin to read it in depth. I'm trying to keep the research process as organic as possible, though perhaps this is coming at the expense of organization at times. One thing I've found that really helps is that I'm genuinely interested in my topic of research, and I read much quicker as a result.

Allapattah

Allapattah is a classic example of a melting pot. Primarily white until the late ‘50s, Allapattah experienced a demographic and cultural transformation sparked by the displacement (by the construction of I-95) of African Americans in the 1960’s. Later, Central American immigrants began to pour in; eventually transforming Allapattah into a predominantly Spanish-speaking community. And though today Allapattah is much safer than it has been in the past, some problems still persist: for one thing, there is a very real (and visible) homeless presence. Also, unless you’re especially fond of Hondurian cusine, you may find yourself driving for a bite to eat. Allapattah can best described as a “friendly” and "close-knit" community with a rich cultural heritage.

Starting from scratch

After having my initial proposal denied, I've had to start thinking of a new project from scratch. What I came up with is something relating to important (in the sense that they effect all of our lives) global issues, and college student's perceptions of them. So far I've narrowed the list of issues down to: globalization, resource scarcity, energy policy, environmental issues, and security issues. I believe this project will be both practical (from an information gathering standpoint), as well as informative (in the sense that I should be able to attain good qualitative information rather easily).

A little progress...

After much thought, I've mostly settled on the topic of pedophelia in the Catholic Church and it's possible causes. As far as a framework, I'm considering social constructionism. This topic interests me because I've seen and heard so little in terms of explanation for why the priests do what they do. And in this way, I think  social constructionism is a good fit, in terms of providing a strong framework from which to approach the issue. It might be difficult but I think that if I could find a 'victim' to interview, that it could really strengthen my project; this should no doubt be helped by the sheer number of victims out there.