Randy Stoecker

Evaluating and Rethinking the Case Study

This paper will first explore briefly how the case study fell out of favour as a legitimate research tool, and how case study researchers responded to the critique that case study research lacked internal and external validity. Some case study advocates attempted to meet this critique by using the case to compare different theoretical predictions, dividing the case into subcases, or treating the case as an experiment. A more effective response distinguishes between ‘extensive’ and ‘intensive’ research designs, and critiques the extensive model. The paper then provides a clarification of purpose and a revived emphasis on theory, history, and intervention to develop the case study method. This paper will begin to construct a comprehensive case study methodology independent of the old critiques, and will show the crucial place which case studies must occupy in our craft.

Are Academics Irrelevant? Roles for Scholars in Participatory Research.

Interest in participatory research has exploded over the past decade. Academics seem to follow three approaches in participatory research: the initiator, the consultant, and the collaborator. After discussing the approaches, this article argues that doing the research is not a goal in itself but only a means. Participatory research is actually part of a larger community change project that is dependent on four roles: “animator,” community organizer, popular educator, and participatory researcher. Determining how the academic will fit in the project (as initiator, consultant, or collaborator) requires addressing three questions: What is the project trying to do? What are the academics skills? and How much participation does the community need or want? The answers to these questions will vary according to how organized the community is.

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING OR ORGANIZING COMMUNITY? Gender and the Crafts of Empowerment

This article looks at two strains of urban community organizing, distinguished by philosophy and often by gender, and influenced by the historical division of American society into public and private spheres. The authors compare the well-known Alinsky model, which focuses on communities organizing for power, and what they call the women-centered model, which focuses on organizing relationships to build community. These models are rooted in somewhat distinct traditions and vary along several dimensions, including conceptions of human nature and conflict, power and politics, leadership, and the organizing process. The authors conclude by examining the implications of this analysis and questions for further research and practice.

Are we talking the walk of community-based research?

When we present ourselves as doing research that is participatory and action oriented, are we meeting either of those goals? An analysis of 232 concept applications sent to the Sociological Initiatives Foundation community-based research funding pool shows that most proposed research emphasized neither participation nor action. Grassroots community members, or organizations controlled by them, were rarely involved at the crucial decision stages of research, and instead limited to participation in collecting data. In addition, most research was proposed to produce papers, presentations or websites, rather than directly support action. The article provides a theoretical analysis of why participation and action are crucial and a set of reommendations for how to move toward research that is more participatory and integrally connected to action.

Challenging institutional barriers to community-based research

Those of us attempting to develop truly equal partnerships with communities and community organizations, using the method of community-based research, encounter many barriers. These barriers revolve around who sets the schedule, who determines the labor pool, who controls the product, and who gets the funding. In this article, a case study shows how those barriers exert themselves, and evaluates the success of strategies to challenge those barriers. It ends with a set of recommendations for changing university overhead policies, developing university quality control practices, refining the university IRB process, institutionalizing a flash seminar structure, and training community members to control the research relationship.

Understanding the Development-Organizing Dialectic

ABSTRACT: Can community organizing and community development be practiced in combination through community development corporations (CDCs)? While community organizing and community development have complementary goals, they are based on potentially contradictory worldviews and occupy potentially contradictory social structural locations. Whether the two strategies can be combined in a single organization without causing severe disruption is questionable. A three-year historical and comparative case study of CDCs involved in the Toledo Community Organizing Training and Technical Assistance Program shows the challenges faced by CDCs attempting to combine organizing and development. The analysis traces changes in the program and the CDCs through honeymoon, conflict, and resolution stages. Of the three CDCs that began the program, one dropped out early, another continued organizing as long as the program continued but then ended its organizing efforts, and a third continued its organizing efforts. The analysis confirms the dialectical relationship between community organizing and community development, showing how the two continuing CDCs differed in their contradictive management strategies.

Making Connections: Community Organizing, Empowerment Planning, and Participatory Research in Participatory Evaluation

This article shows the intersections of participatory research, popular education, empowerment planning, and community organizing with participatory evaluation. It argues that a truly successful participatory evaluation involves participants in guiding and even conducting the research, doing a process of self- and program study, creating plans for change, and organizing themselves for implementing these plans. Next, the chapter shows how these elements played out in a participatory evaluation of a community organizing training and technical assistance project in Toledo, Ohio. The first year of the project was facilitated by participatory evaluation that helped identify early successes and problems so participants could make programmatic changes early in the process. The telling of the story also develops practices of participatory evaluation, including planning the evaluation, doing the research and adapting it to changing conditions, uncovering creative tensions, participatory validity checking, and linking the process to planning and action. The chapter concludes with some lessons for participatory evaluation practice.

Can Community-Based Research Guide Service Learning?

Research on service learning is beginning to show that the academy may be using communities to serve students, rather than engaging students in effectively serving communities. This article begins by documenting the extent of the potential problem and its underlying dimensions. It then goes on to develop an alternative model to guide service learning, building on community development models and community-based research (CBR) practices. Using this alternative model allowed us to create an outcome-oriented service-learning plan, and better monitor its implementation. We then analyze how this model plays out in an ongoing service-learning project. The analysis shows how the model was able to engage stakeholders in designing the project and creating specific, goal-oriented service-learning projects that could be carefully supervised to maximize community outcomes. However, we could not overcome the weakness of service learning imposed by an ill-suited higher education structure and culture.

Cyberspace vs. Face-to-Face: Community Organizing in the New Millennium

This paper explores the influences of the Internet on the practice of community organizing. There are continuing questions over the scale of community organizing—how much to focus on the local versus the global—as well as over the models of social action—whether to organize institutions or individuals, use conflict or cooperation tactics, and other questions. This paper assesses whether the growing involvement of the Internet in community organizing has any influence on those questions. It looks at the early days of the Internet in community organizing, with particular attention to the free software movement, the Zapatista rebellion, the Communications Decency Act, and the early anti-globalization movement. The analysis of those cases shows that the Internet has influenced the scale of community organizing, allowing for a much better link between local and global efforts. The Internet has not, however, ushered in new effective models of organizing.

States, Cultures, and Community Organizing: Two Tales of Two Neighborhoods

How do differences between the United States and Canadian political systems affect community organizing? We compare case studies of two neighborhoods: the Drouillard Road neighborhood in Windsor, Ontario, Canada; and the Birmingham neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio, United States. Toledo and Windsor are similar in important ways, with both heavily dependent on Detroit-based automotive industry, and relatively similar in ethnic and class makeup. The neighborhoods also have similar demographic profiles with a high proportion of Eastern European immigrants and Catholics. Both neighborhoods witnessed threats to their existence in the 1970s, developed an energetic community organizing response to those threats, and then went separate directions. Drouillard Road quickly moved into social services and community development. Birmingham expanded its community organizing across the east side of Toledo, but then was torn apart by internal conflict when it shifted to community development. Our analysis shows that the contrasting paths of the two organizations can be more fully understood in light of national differences in political structure and political culture between Canada and the United States.