Meghan Cope

Grounded Visualization: Integrating the Analysis of Qualitative and Quantitative Data through Grounded Theory and Visualization

Our purpose in this paper is to conceptualize and demonstrate an integrated analytical method for using both qualitative and quantitative data through geographic information systems (GIS) and ethnography. We acknowledge that the use of both types of data has been possible in GIS for some time, particularly for representation purposes. However, a recursive integration of different forms of data at the analysis level has been less explored and minimally theorized. Drawing on recent work in critical GIS and feminist perspectives, we suggest that visualization offers a strong technique for this effort but we approach it from the analytical base of grounded theory. Thus, we present an example of how grounded theory and visualization might be used together to construct an integrated analysis strategy that is both iterative and reflexive, both contextual and conceptual. We use Knigges work on community gardens in Buffalo, New York, to provide a substantive example of the proposed methods.

Empowering women's citizenship

Abstract This paper addresses the question of whether citizenship is used as a basis for social change, and if so, how. We first examine the meanings of citizenship as a qualification that encompasses more than just political rights, and as a formally granted status that is mediated by informal structures. We then build the concept of an ‘empowering citizenship’. Specifically, we demonstrate that women themselves often turn the situation around and use their de jure status as citizens (through employment and political activism) to challenge the de facto barriers to full social inclusion that they encounter, such as gendered divisions of labor and discrimination in education and employment. Interviews of women in Pueblo, Colorado are used to solidify the proposed links between womens political and economic standing and the negotiation of citizenship.

Patchwork neighborhood: children’s urban geographies in Buffalo, New York

The West Side of the City of Buffalo, New York, is a neighborhood in racial and ethnic transition, demographically. However, at any given time it represents a snapshot of a geographic area that is diverse economically, ethnically, and racially, and in terms of its built environment. I use the notion of ‘patchwork’ first as a literal interpretation based on a quilting project I facilitated with children from an after-school program in this location. Second, ‘patchwork’ is used as a metaphor capturing results of neighborhood explorations led by the children over three years (2003–06). Specifically, as I explore childrens perceptions of ‘neighborhood’, the notion of ‘patchwork’ seems to accommodate their varied understandings, views, and perspectives of their neighborhoods well. Simultaneously, the notion also contributes to the fluid and active construction of the term in urban geography.

Labor and Housing Markets as Public Spaces: ‘Personal Responsibility’ and the Contradictions of Welfare-Reform Policies

Recent US welfare-form initiatives affecting employment and housing assistance have promoted more flexible applications of assistance as well as devolving the responsibility of care for the poor from federal levels to the individual. Implicit in these policy changes is the assumption that individuals enter labor and housing markets where open access is the norm and a ‘level playing field’ exists. In this paper, we use the analogy of seeing labor and housing markets as public spaces to analyze how the ideals of democratic capitalism in labor and housing markets exist normatively, but are always violated in practice. We argue that the influence of neoliberalism, and the devolution of welfare responsibility to the individual in particular, have led to policy changes that neglect issues of unequal access connected to hierarchies of race and gender and their spatial manifestations. Welfare reform in the specific areas of employment and housing assistance has promoted the primacy of private markets as essential components to ensuring social welfare. These reforms have super-ficially opened more options to recipients of public assistance while simultaneously allowing to continue the instruments, institutions, and structural forces that constrain practical access to the full range of jobs and housing. We argue that efforts to maintain these markets have not been distributed to measures ensuring fair play of participants. As a consequence, some problematic contradictions between policy and practice call into question the suitability of the private market as a strategy of providing welfare for the poor.

BETWEEN WELFARE AND WORK: THE ROLES OF SOCIAL SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS IN THE SOCIAL REGULATION OF LABOR MARKETS AND REGULATION OF THE POOR

In the literature on the social regulation of labor markets, the point is often made that employers are not the only significant actors. Within the context of welfare “reform,” with its punitive work requirements and time limits for support, other institutions and actors are being revealed as significant for both the regulation of the labor market and the regulation of the poor. This paper seeks to conceptualize the multiple roles of non-profit social service organizations (SSOs) by connecting their everyday practices to a broader consideration of SSOs as significant mediating institutions that construct particular types of linkages between public assistance and waged labor. Interviews with directors of these organizations in Buffalo, New York in 1977 demonstrate that SSOs have significant impacts on the social regulation of the poor and on the implementation of welfare reform through internal rules, enforcement of broader social policy, job training and educational programs, and general family support. Further, these organizations are involved in political advocacy on behalf of their clients, key social networks with each other and with local businesses, and on-the-ground interpretation of policy directives, placing them in an often contradictory role as both enforcer and advocate and locating them between welfare and work. I suggest that by looking at these complex intermediaries we can identify ways in which social policy and labor market regulation converge in specific contexts. At a broader conceptual level, the issue of regulation is used in this paper as a framework for deepening our understanding of the combined forces of economic restructuring and state devolution. [Key words: social regulation of labor markets, welfare reform, gender division of labor, social service organizations, Buffalo, NY]

Challenging Adult Perspectives on Children's Geographies through Participatory Research Methods: Insights from a Service-Learning Course

In this paper, the author adopts the notion that working with children in some ways highlights the challenges of university-level pedagogy and research ethics; this is done by evaluating a service-learning course she conducted with undergraduate and graduate students that was based on childrens urban geographies. In the course of this examination, she considers ways that aiming towards child-led, participatory approaches created several practical and ethical dilemmas but also stimulated critical reflection on positionality in research and teaching. A set of suggestions is offered for working with children in participatory qualitative research projects that emerged from insights gained in this endeavor, and the author also confronts a set of six attitudes she and her students had to engage with in order to move toward a less essentializing and more critically rigorous participatory research practice.

GEOGRAPHIES OF WELFARE REFORM

Beginning with the Contract with America of the 1994 Congress, and continuing through the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 to the present, the issue of welfare has once again permeated political debates at the federal, state, and local levels. As initial results of evaluation projects and research emerge in this period of early implementation of the new rules, geographers are particularly well positioned to examine the impacts of welfare reform on different groups of people, in different places, and the variations in representation of welfare/workfare rhetoric and discourse. Far from merely documenting spatial variations, however, the papers in this issue demonstrate the commitment geographers have to bringing a spatial perspective to critical research and debate on welfare reform, social policy, and poverty. The papers further suggest that analyzing and theorizing changes in public assistance requires a broader analysis of issues of representation and rhetoric, state devolution, economic restructuring, spatial scale and place context, and the differentiated trajectories of industrialized countries in an increasingly global economy.

Home-Work Links, Labor Markets, and the Construction of Place in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1929–1939

This paper addresses the issue of how to combine, on one hand, the everyday links that are established and maintained between home and work, and on the other, the demand-driven social regulation of labor markets. It is argued that by taking an approach acknowledging the complexity of networks and the “constellations of relations” involved in forming local labor markets, we can better understand the meshing of divisions of labor at home and at work, in concert with the demands of local employers. In this respect, the roles of households, ethnic communities, and employers are taken to be critical and interdependent in forming local labor markets and, ultimately, constructing places. Census and archival data are used from Lawrence, Massachusetts to examine these issues through the situation of woolen mill workers of the 1920s and 1930s.

Transcripts (Coding and Analysis)

Transcription is the operation of transferring audio- or video-taped material into verbatim text documents. Other materials may also be transcribed into digital text format for convenient storage and analysis, such as researchers’ own fieldnotes, historical ephemera and archival data, photo descriptions, and participants’ handwritten materials (such as travel diaries). Transcription itself has some practical issues that researchers should consider when embarking on such a task, such as time commitments, equipment, and details of successful transcribing strategies. Transcripts can then be coded and analyzed, but this too brings up methodological and conceptual issues. A basic primer on coding is provided, as well as some examples to illustrate techniques, relevant software (CAQDAS), codings strengths, and its challenges.

Qualitative Geographic Information Systems

Qualitative geographic information systems (GIS) is a term representing diverse attempts to integrate qualitative data into existing GIS programs. Three common approaches are identified in the literature: (1) qualitative research projects that benefit from the data analysis and geographical representation strengths of GIS; (2) quantitative projects using GIS that benefit from the contextualizing and explanatory strengths of incorporating some qualitative research and data; and (3) research projects that were planned from the start using mixed methods, integrating the strengths of various methods, and allowing them to complement, contradict, or confirm each other. Because of these characteristics, qualitative GIS projects are particularly important in research focused on context, processes, relations, and explanation for why phenomena happen where they do. Qualitative GIS is also well suited to participatory and critical social research in which disempowered social groups construct alternate ‘truths’ to counter-map on the mainstream status quo. Rapid technology advances are fostering ever-quicker combinations of spatially referenced data with other forms and sources of information and different software systems are increasingly becoming compatible, all of which generate new possibilities and practices for integrating qualitative data and GIS.