Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Drafting your method, designing your study
Drawing upon your small group discussions and the questions and feedback you received from your peers, I’d like you to draft a 200-250 word methodology for your study. Explain to me and the rest of class how you will conduct this study and what kind of research you will draw on. (Another way to phrase this: How will you design your study?) As you conclude this response, reflect on the limitations of this methodology. That is, what will you not learn from your study? Or, what is impossible to find out given your research design?
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In order to fulfill the requirements of this paper I choose to write on how service learning and volunteering relates to Democracy. In other words, is it an American duty to give back to the society via serving the public good. Just as voting is considered an essential duty as an American, is the public good also an American duty. An interesting way to decipher this question is to analyze the voting turn outs in America and other countries and see how that statistic related to the volunteering rate in respective countries. For example, Australia has a voter turn out near 100%, whereas the U.S. voter turn out is significantly less. Does this mean that Australia has a significantly higher rate of volunteerism than the U.S. does. In order to reach an ultimate conclusion I am going to need to utilize many sources and interpret many sources to analyze their value and worth.
Though my questions are not completely solid, I do have a sense as to how I am going to conduct my research. I have a number of secondary sources that I can frame my thesis from. I also plan to conduct a number of interviews that will extrapolate other’s views and personal experiences in regards to civic engagement.
I will be involved with Project Homeless Connect on Friday, so I will be exposed to a large number of volunteers, I can casually draw on why those people have volunteered and their attitudes associated with it.
There are many limitations with this study, and for that matter, all studies. It is impossible to obtain a consensus on a theoretical question, or to even obtain a definitive answer. The best thing to realize is that the writer is giving their own opinion and interpretation of the situation based on their findings. There is not a right answer to the question that is being asked. Even after all of the data is compiled, the write can choose to go either way with it.
The main limitation of this type of assignment is the expected length of the paper. A question like this could be researched for years and could be worthy of a dissertation. A five-page cap is fairly restrictive and limits the depth of developing a true argument. Understanding this restriction will alter the amount of research conducted and how broad of a thesis that the writer can argue.
After my small group chat, I have decided to do most of my research from quantitative research. I want to find facts and then draw conclusion from those facts. I will be working on the 18 through 24 age group and will only be looking at election held in the United States. I will start out answering the question on how voting is related to the public good. Especially teen voting and how we are the future of America.
Some questions I will be answering are: How much are youth contributing to campaigning? – From that question I also will be wondering how much money to they donate to the campaign? And looking at their attendance rates at rallies. I also will be looking at how the youth is influenced by voting strategies? Possible influences might include media, telemarketing, and other types of advertising. I might also conduct a short in-class survey. Question from that survey might include: are you registered to vote? What factors influence your willingness to vote? What discourages you to vote? Will you be participating in the upcoming presidential election?
After answering these questions and possibly a few more that come up in my researching I will be relating this back to the public good and discussing how voting is important. After doing my research I think I will be able to answer that question better after I figure out a strong tie between youth voting and the public good.
My study involves analyzing the philosophies of Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and Kant. Along my search I may find other sources that I want to briefly include. My research is mainly involved with the philosophies and then applying them to the public good. I know some are more on an individual level such as Aristotle and Kant. With these two, I may have to extrapolate general claims from their works and construct an argument of how these claims apply to the community as a whole. Also, I may find that I want to use one philosophy as a main claim and compare the others to it.
There are some limitations to interpreting texts. One is that, each philosophy represents one man’s particular opinion. I’m not looking at statistical data that might represent the main population. This might limit my philosophy that I construct at the end of the research because it will be simply based on three or so others personal theories. I’m hoping to read different philosophies while keeping my mind open to how I want to define the public good.
In our study, we will use mostly qualitative research to get the thoughts and opinions of three students at DU who have participated in service learning (specifically at Project Homeless Connect). Our general "big picture" question as of now, is whether service learning should be required of DU students or not. The general question will be very spread out; we will ask the three students why they participated in PHC, what they got out of it, did they think it was productive...etc. Our methodology will be in the form of an APA research paper. We will have an introduction, explaining what we are exploring and why. We will also include here, the current policies and expectation of DU regarding service learning. We will then have a methods section describing who we interviewed, and what information we provided and asked. We will have a results section, summarizing what information and opinions we received from each of the students, and what their final answer/explanation was in terms of our general question. In our discussion section, we will elaborate on what our results may imply. We may also talk about the success (or failure) that DU has achieved thus far in terms of service learning and its importance.
Our quantitative data we wish to include may be limited due to the small sample of students. We only are interviewing three people, so we cannot make general conclusions about the DU student body.
Keren and Michelle
My thoughts on how to conduct this study are still rather vague, but I have a few basic foundations upon which I hope to build. My study will focus on the service of this WRIT 1133-26 class this quarter. Through both interpretive and qualitative analysis, I will delve into the motivation behind service and how this motivation affects outcome.
I plan to use our course blogs and service logs as my primary source to interpret how one’s motivation affects the outcome of a service being performed. I will evaluate this outcome on both a personal and a civic level. One way to do this is through direct quotations and thoughts from the class logs.
As I am reading through the logs, I may encounter some promising thoughts or ideas that appear to be unfinished. In this case, I plan to follow up with certain individuals through brief personal interviews. This will allow me to ask direct questions that will cater to my study.
Finally, I plan to draw on other outside sources to both support and counter my own study. My study is very limited by the size of this class, yet general trends are sure to become apparent. I will use outside sources to see if these trends are in accordance with broader studies and statistics.
I will start with giving a survey to DU students. It will be hard to get accurate results from this survey because of the limited number of students so I think I will limit it to freshman students. The questions on this survey will be asking of the knowledge of students about the service-learning program at DU and any involvement. The purpose of this survey is to see how many people know about the program or have been involved.
I will then interview the director of the service-learning program. I want to ask him for some statistics of student involvement, such as how many students are enrolled in service-learning classes and how many classes there are. I also want to ask him if there has been an increase in the size of the program since the DU statement of vision was changed to be dedicated to the public good. I want to find out how much money from the program is spent on advertising or publicity and what forms there are, how is the word about service learning spread on campus?
The survey will be focused on freshman but the paper will be on DU in general.
The purpose of this paper is to see if the service learning program has expanded since the vision of DU changed and how they have gone about expanding it.
The paper will focus on the expansion of the program and it’s effectiveness in reaching the students in order to effectively help the public good. They survey information will be used as a tool to show how many students know about the program and the interview will be used to show how the program has changed because of DUs vision, or how it has not changed.
For my study, I wanted to see what effects social capital has on individual productivity and then relate it to the public good and getting involved with service learning/community service. First, I wanted to get in touch with Sarah Pessim’s class and find out what they have been doing. Then I wanted to introduce social capital and what it is to them. Lastly, I want to conduct an interview in which I will dive deeper into their service learning experience and see whether or not they appreciate the work they have done, and does it mean anything to them more that just a course requirement. Looking into their motivation, I will investigate their social upbringing and whether social capital has made them more productive and thoughtful workers in correlation to the service learning that they have done.
Continuing off of my qualitative research, I wanted to bring more facts and issues concerning social capital. This will help me, along with my reader in understanding the larger picture of social capital and the many things it relates to. Using Putnam and several other sources from the DU library and article database, I will try to back up my claim and gather interesting information on service learning. With a very open topic, social capital might leave me with limitations in trying to prove my hypothesis. I’m positive that I will find interesting connections between service learning/public good and social capital but will it provide me with good examples of its effects on the pubic good and service learning? I’m not sure to be honest but I hope I can draw on some evidence, clear-cut or not, from my sources that shows some effects and or connections.
Laura and I were going gather information for our papers by conducting a survey and short interviews of people in this class as well as people on the Social Justice LLC hall. We would like to get a general overview of experiences with required service learning as part of a class or program here, hear people talk about their experiences, good and bad. Hopefully we can learn if they’ve had meaningful experiences. However, due to time constraints, we are instead going to look at our class blog and what people have said about their experiences with service work. There are many responses and reflections about the volunteering at Project Angel Heart and from those we could discuss in our papers the experiences of volunteering at DU. I might still also choose to do brief interviews of the people on the Social Justice Hall to include in my research. We are also planning to supplement our quantitative research with academic sources that discuss service learning in the college environment.
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