Researcher(s):
Genevieve Emerson Scotti Reed Julia Benford Kimball Stewart
ENVS course(s): 330 Initiated: March 2016 Completed: April 2016 Go to project site
|
Researchers: Julia Benford, Kimball Stewart, Scotti Reed, Genevieve Emerson
When we first began our normative research journey, we were initially inspired by what has been known as the artisanal or slow food movement. In direct response to the mass-produced food commonly found in grocery stores, alternative food movements have taken place worldwide, ranging from direct-market options (farmers markets and food collectives) to slow-food movements (an ideology that emphasizes the importance of food as art, culture, and a part of agricultural identity) and organic farming (Feagan 2007). These alternative movements often use rhetoric that emphasizes the importance of local farming and fair trade as a rejection of globalized commodities and industrialized food (Smithers and Joseph 2009). One fair trade industry that intrigued us the most was that of coffee. Inspired by both coffee's development from a working class beverage to a high class craft beverage, as well as a previous project done by our peers in a previous environmental studies course, we decided to design a project around the following questions:
What are the consequences of the third-wave coffee movement (its ideology, practices, and culture)?
What opinions do Portland residents have about the third wave coffee movement in Portland?
Do these consumers believe there is a social benefit or social cost to participating in the third wave coffee movement?
We chose to situate this project in Portland, OR, because of the importance that coffee has as a cultural symbol. We had many ideas for how we wanted to go about answering these questions. We initially wanted to do a combination of in person surveys and GIS mapping to compare the racial breakdowns of certain neighborhoods in Portland with consumer attitudes about craft coffee. However, due to some time restraints and other difficulties, in the end we chose to rely exclusively on 20 surveys that we collected from craft coffee shops in various neighborhoods in Portland, including Sellwood, Hawthorne, and downtown. Our survey asked various questions about how much coffee people drink, where they typically buy their coffee from, how many times they frequent craft coffee establishments, and what they think about craft coffee establishments compared with chain coffee places, etc. We then performed regression analysis on a few of our variables. Although we did not find anything of statistical significance, we learned from a word cloud that we made from people's responses to one of our variables that our respondents were generally positive about craft coffee establishments and the people who frequent them. For future studies, we would be interested in completing our study in a city that has more racial and ethnic diversity. Overall, this project taught our group a lot about the trials and errors of research and the importance of having an appropriate research design given the time frame of the project. Our project also provides a good jumping off point for future studies to go more in depth about how craft coffee has both been shaped by as well as influenced the community of Portland, OR.