METHODOLOGY

            Through our the last couple of weeks we have been doing a little of two things in my Senior Capstone Class; we’ve had an in house group and a CBO group. The CBO group was given the opportunity to go to non-profit organizations around Boston to do some community service as well as to collect data for our research papers. The in house group on the other hand had one on one attention with our teacher and had group discussions about PAR, and GIS.

            We came to the conclusion that participatory action research (PAR) isn’t just any type of research; you can’t just get online and collect data from different websites. You need to actually go to different locations, survey people, interview people, make your own graphs and analyze it to help correct the issue that was researched. Traditional research is just going online or in books to collect data that has no real meaning. Anybody can do PAR. The most people that do it however, are students (wendy), mayors, community activist and many other people. The main goals of PAR are to be able to identify social issues in our community, to collect data, and to educate people about those issues.  

When I was doing my CBO placement, I had the opportunity to go to HOPE. HOPE is a non-profit organization that specializes in keeping youth out of trouble in every way possible, whether it’s by helping them with homework or even by educating them on STDs and or preventing teen pregnancy. Through HOPE, I was able to not really collect data but I was able to learn a lot more about different types of STDs and reasons why more Hispanic girls are getting pregnant at young ages. All of the information I was given really helped a lot with the format and angle that I wanted my paper to go in.

            GIS is another data technique that we learned in our in house groups, GIS is a combination of both geography and human geography; when thinking of GIS, you should first think of maps, locations, and data. GIS, however, takes human geography and runs with it, it’s a way to figure out many different things: it could be where in the United States are more Mexicans, who’s voting for whom when it come to the presidential elections, or even what state in the United States are more teens having babies. GIS is very useful for all types of information. When learning about GIS, I realized that I can use this system to map out all the information I collect through my surveys, and interviews. While at my site, I interviewed Mayra O. and she is a woman that works one on one with the teens that go to HOPE. She gave me a lot of good information, and managed to give me a lot of good statistics on my topic. I wasn’t able to collect quantitative data but I got a lot of qualitative data.

            To help me write this paper, learning about PAR and GIS played a really big part, in placing different pieces in certain places, and educating myself on how to graph the data I collected and on the importance in my research. The internship also played an even bigger part, because I was given the opportunity to speak with people that deal with these issues every day.