Until now, I have been dancing around with a few thesis ideas, not really ready to pick a partner. Today I think I’m almost ready to completely commit, and I’m excited about the prospect of dancing around with this particular project for the next few months (AKA 8 months). It seems to combine everything I have been interested in, yet focuses it in enough to make it feasible and relevant. Today I even met with Mark Duntley, a member of the Institutional Review Board, to discuss ethical methodologies, and got my methodologies loosely approved.
The key ideas/frameworks I will deal with in this project are networks/systems, social capital, crisis response/community organizing, place, local/global, trust, trusted organizations, and third spaces. I know I said I narrowed my focus down and this long and vague list of big words probably doesn’t seem like I have! My narrower focus comes from my methodological lens: the Nextdoor app. I’m planning to examine the multiple “waves” of crisis response, from the individual, to interactions with neighbors, to seeking help from a trusted community organization. These frameworks will be important to discuss in depth in my thesis, and I will use my research with Nextdoor as a way to document connections in our neighborhood web.
Questions
Descriptive: What kinds of relationships are currently being formed between neighbors?
Explanatory: How do individuals and organizations establish trust?
Evaluative: How do community relations facilitate or impede successful crisis response?
Instrumental: To what extent can trusted organizations enhance the resilience of community networks before a crisis occurs?
Major Data Sources
I plan to document relationships and connections made on the Nextdoor app, and potentially distribute a survey (maybe via Nextdoor) inquiring about my neighbors’ perceptions of each other, local organizations, and disaster preparedness. I might interview neighbors about interactions they recently had, and how successful they were. I am still interested in the potential of gathering mental maps from people, or possibly collecting “map your neighborhood” maps that have already been made by NET groups. To ground my ideas in something concrete, I will do research on the Christchurch earthquake response, and potentially interview some people present during the 2011 quake.
Methods
As of now, I am still trying to figure out exactly how I will use the data on Nextdoor beyond counting the “thanks” and replies that various posts receive. For the next few days I’ll monitor the content to get a better idea of what kinds of posts I will focus on. The survey responses I would receive would mostly be quantitative, and I could create graphs and charts to visually represent the data I collect. I’m also interested in using Gephi or some other social network analysis tool to visually represent connections. If I use mental maps or the “map my neighborhood” NET map I might overlay it on a Google Maps map to compare differences and similarities in what people include in their neighborhood and that is actually there.
Overall I’m excited for where this project will take me! There are still a lot of kinks to roll out but I think it’s taken on an interesting direction that I’m happy with.
