Today’s assignment was to create an outline for our 5 page thesis due next week. Approaching this assignment was an interesting exercise for me since we’ve already written a final synthesis and a full length outline. Last time my outline was way too long — so this time I tried to vastly simplify it since I know I won’t have much space for it anyway. The “situating” document that Liz gave us was really helpful in thinking about lateral and vertical situation, which helped me (hopefully) narrow down the most essential ideas that I’ll need to convey to explain the basis of my thesis. I’m excited about narrowing it down because then I’ll be sure of what the central ideas are, which I can then strengthen, and later flesh out with ideas that I know are important but not imperative. This is what I tried to do especially for the top of the hourglass — last outline, my background section was almost a page and a half long, which was a bit overwhelming. I cut that back to what I think are the most essential ideas. It will be difficult to cut down my results since there are a lot of interesting findings that don’t necessarily directly tie into each other, but this will give me the opportunity to choose which I believe are most important for my study.
Below you will find the outline for my 5 page thesis.
Love Thy Neighbor (Or know them at least): Trust, Relationships, and Disaster Preparedness
Top of Hourglass
Disaster Preparedness
- PBEM, Emergency Responders, Oregon Resilience Plan Executive Summary
- Know your neighbors (Gragg 2014)
- Decline of Third Places (Oldenburg 1989)
- Introduction to virtual third places (Steinkuehler et al. 2006)
- Trust, capacity, available resources, willingness to share (Aldride 2007)
Framing Question: To what extent can trusted organizations enhance the resilience of community networks before a crisis occurs?
Middle of Hourglass
Focus Question: What kinds of relationships are currently being formed between neighbors, and are they helpful or harmful in facilitating connection?
Nextdoor post coding
- Trust building vs. trust-eroding
- Informational vs. controversial/emotional
- Insiders vs. outsiders
- Dog owners, college students, solicitors
Survey questions and theories behind selected questions
- Trust, Third Place, Intention behind using Nextdoor
Results
- Demographic information about the neighborhood
- Nextdoor has facilitated in-person meetings between neighbors
- Notable similarities between Nextdoor and qualities of Third Places
Bottom of Hourglass
Discussion
- Insider groups vs. outsider groups → how to bridge the divide
- Which interactions seem to build the most trust
- Demographic of neighborhood (SES, race, education) makes it hard to generalize out to other neighborhoods/communities
Implications
- Disaster communication → trusted space = taken more seriously (Haynes et al. 2008)
- Knowledge of resources, both human and material (Bouchillon 2014)
- Frees up emergency response teams
Additionally, here is a revised version of my CMap.