Labs of Contextualized Urban Social Work
Field research basics
Finalisation
To finalise your survey, team up with your education partner and integrate the questions the residents have made with the requirements for the course.
Considerations
- Who would you invite to share their ideas about the survey?
- How would you make sure every resident gets enough space to talk?
- Which priorities do you have as a social professional and how would you let the community consider them?
Build a survey with partners and residents
The survey we suggest you use during the LOCUS project is build up during two separate activities. On the one hand, the survey must be able to integrate with the course learning outcomes. That is way one part of the survey will be built around those parameters. The other part of the survey can be built in collaboration with the residents.
Working with residents
As you can see in Module 3 and Module 7, community meetings are an important part of LOCUS. During these meetings you can engage the community in shaping the research focus.
The best way to do this is to invite the community over to your workplace to introduce the project and invite them to be an active part in this. We suggest you do not bring students to this meeting, but only lecturers, residents and social workers.
The goal of this meeting is to inventorise what social issues play in the neighbourhood and what would the residents want to learn more about.
Method
Our method for this is rather simple. We ask our residents to write down questions they would like to ask other neighbours about living in that area. These questions can be formulated in any way. The beauty of this method is that residents write down whatever they personally think is interesting to know about the people in their environment.
During the meeting you discuss the questions that have come up and collaboratively pin down three main themes that are most prevalent. These themes will be the focus of the survey.
Partners
