Would you like to know about the young adults in your community? It's not hard. It's not even that time consuming. Here is a process you can adapt for yourselves:
- A core group is a team of people to guide, inform, and connect.
- Locally, find out who else is interested in this question so you can build a core group. In each of our case study communities, we organized a core group of two or more people (4-6 people is ideal) to guide the process of learning about young people. The job of the core group is to see the research through from beginning to end.
- Of course your core group should have young adult representation on it, but it doesn't need to be all young adults. It is also helpful to have people on the core group who know about research—but remember that even people who are not credentialed experts in research have important insights into what kinds of research will work best in your community.
- Core group members don't have to be any people in particular, though it is helpful if they are different enough from each other that they have networks in different parts of your community. That way you can access the widest possible diversity of interviewees.
- This will help others understand why they should care about it too.
- Before you begin to do any actual research, ask yourselves what you want to learn about young adults and what you will do with the information once you learn it.
- If it's just for curiosity, that may not be enough to sustain your work or generate interest in the community. If, on the other hand, local government is interested in using it for planning, or for local business development, or for local school programming, then there may be a practical use for the information.
- Your core group should always be in the driver's seat, but having acess to someone with trained research skills can help make this process a lot smoother.
- Find people with the skills you need whether that is analysis, writing, communication, or data collection. Getting insider tips from someone who does this type of thing for a living can be very helpful. There are plenty of resources and people around with whom you can connect.
- Your area UW-Extension educator, professors from area colleges and universities, teachers at the local high school, as well as other people in your community trained in research are available to answer questions and perhaps even help in more extensive ways. See more contacts and tips at the bottom of this page.
- Find out what changes have occurred in your local population using already existing information.
- You can get basic data for your community from the U.S census, from our project (we have young adults data on every community in the state) and perhaps from your local government.
- That data will help you learn whether the young adults in your community are increasing or decreasing, along with a lot of other information (other sources like Social Explorer, are pretty easy to use and visually appealing).
- This will determine what type of data you gather and how many other resources you need to search for. You may have all the resources you need to learn about the young adults in your community.
- Your local expertise and connections are the most valuable resources anyone could have. Next to that are the connections around your region that you can make with individuals and institutions such as UW-Extension, universities and colleges, and community groups.
- Depending on the data gathering method you choose (see the discussion of surveys and interviews further down) you may need a larger group of people with specific data gathering skills. If you choose interviews, for example, you will need interviewers. If you choose surveys, you may need people who can enter data into a computer. You will also need people to do the analysis.
- You may want to talk about whether to do a survey where you contact a lot of people for a very brief amount of time or more in-depth interviews with fewer people.
- A lot of people think that surveys are the best, but I disagree. You may be able to talk to more people, but surveys are a lot harder to do well than most people expect and they can be expensive. Here are some other things to think about with surveys:
- First, it is getting harder and harder to get decent response rates on surveys—returns from less than 20% of the people are more and more common. That means it will be difficult to "generalize."
- Second, in this case it is difficult to find a list of all the young adults in the community, and that means you either have to send the survey to everyone, or risk having what is called a "biased" sample.
- Third, the information you will get from a survey is necessarily superficial—how many people checked different boxes (yes, you can send out a survey and ask people to write longer answers, but it's hard enough just to get people to check boxes, let alone write essays).
- Fourth, too many people try to ask every possible question, but the shorter the survey the better (this also applies to interviews). For every question you want to include, ask "how will we use the answers from this question?" If you can't come up with a clear answer, toss the question. Also test out the survey with a few people to see what questions need to be reworded.
- Fifth, it may seem easy to do a basic analysis of a survey—you can just count the answers. But if you have a low response rate, how do you interpret your totals? If you do a sample survey, you then need to think about doing statistical significance tests.
- Interviews can both get good information and help build relationships—especially if you do your interviews in focus groups. These offer in-depth information and allow you to uncover unexpected things, But both individual and group interviews take time and skill. Here are some things to consider about interviews:
- With interviews you can go beyond checkbox answers to learn people's stories. People will often answer questions you didn't think to ask, providing valuable unsolicited information.
- It's possible to make interviews fun. You can do things like a large community dinner with interviewers and recorders at each table.
- If you ask people to not just talk about themselves but about other people, a single interview can represent many more people (see the Stage 2 chapter of this report).
- It only takes a handful of people a few hours to do enough interviews to learn basic information about the community. But it also takes some skills. Getting people to agree to spend 30-60 minutes for an interview, and then getting them to say as much as possible during those 30-60 minutes, is a serious skill (and it can be learned in the pool hall or the church kitchen as well as in college). If you don't feel like you have such expertise, you may be able to engage your local high school social studies teacher and a few of their students, or a professor and some students from a nearby college or university. Pairing students and residents to do interviews together can be really fun.
- You can turn interviews into statistical data, but you may not want to. Instead, with interviews, you can look for themes—things that multiple people say. When multiple people say the same thing, you can have more confidence that it represents an important perspective in the community. You still have to be careful about "generalizing" what you hear from interviews to the entire community. You can't for example, say that a theme represents a majority of the community, but it will represent enough voices that you should pay attention to it. Ultimately, the problem of generalizing from interviews is no worse than for a survey where you only get a small proportion of responses. See more below.
- Especially if you do interviews (though this can also apply to surveys), the core group will want to consider how much they want to protect people's freedom of choice and privacy.
- For example, if someone feels coerced to submit to an interview (like they need to get interviewed before they get a slice of pizza) they may resent it and give you bad data. Sometimes the coercion can be subtle—like if an employer lets you set up a table in the workplace cafeteria and a rumor spreads that the boss wants everyone to participate. Privacy becomes an issue if people say things in the interview that get out to other people and upset them. This is especially a consideration if your interviewers are community members. Those of us at the university are trained in protecting people's privacy and freedom of choice in research and would be happy to talk with you about ways to do that.
- If you have trained researchers collect data for you, ask them to talk with you about different ways of inputting and analyzing the data so that you learn some of the inside story.
- If you do interviews, you need a way of recording people's answers. Sometimes that means writing really fast while they talk. Sometimes it means using the recorder app on your phone and then transcribing the recording later. But you will want to write down what people say in as complete a form as possible.
- Use people's full sentences. Don't reduce their responses to a checkbox or you may as well have done a survey. You may put their answers into a spreadsheet like Google Sheets or Excel, with each person's answer to each question in a separate box. This is actually a reason to not do too many interviews or ask too many questions, so your spreadsheet doesn't get too unwieldy.
- In a small community, you will likely start to hear the same answer after only a handful of interviews. By the time you get to two dozen you will be hearing similar things a lot. We call these "themes." A theme is an idea that keeps getting repeated. People may vary somewhat in exactly what they say, but the basic theme is similar. For example, we found that many people talked about the importance of affordable housing—but for one person that might mean a two-bedroom bungalow in town and for another person that might mean a four-bedroom colonial on a one-acre lot on the edge of town. With a theme you can note both what is common and what the differences are within that common theme.
- The coolest thing you can do with the results is organize some kind of community event where people can get together to talk about them. That was impractical in our project because we weren't local to any of the case study communities. But if you are local it can be much easier to set up a community supper for people to hear about what you found and brainstorm ideas about what the community can do to either keep things going well or make things go better.
- You just did something important for your community. In the best outcomes you actually used research to build community. That is worth celebrating. And it is worth reflecting on because you may decide that you want to use a similar process for a different community question to build your community even more.
Applied Population Lab