Research Question to Analysis Alignment Matrix

Research Questions / Theoretical or Literature Review Assumptions / Data Collection Methods / Selection Decisions / Data Sources / Analytic Considerations or kinds of analysis
What conditions facilitate the existence of stakeholder roles and partnership processes that are characteristic of Democratic Engagement? Technocratic Engagement?
DemTech serves as an abbreviation for the demonstration of both democratic engagement and technocratic engagement. / Enos and Morton (2003) acknowledge that predicting the conditions in which partnerships form is difficult, but go on to provide a handful of considerations: the social and political ecologies of the partnering institutions, organizationally-literate individuals who are members of the partnership, emergent trust that enables the navigation of risk, and faculty who have experienced a change in identity from pedagogue to that of community member or citizen servant. El Ansari, Phillips, and Zwi (2002) outline five domains of stakeholder expertise that are critical for effective collaboration: 1) educational competencies, 2) partnership fostering experience, 3) community involvement skills, 4) change agents proficiencies, and 5) strategic and management capacities. /
  • Document review (meeting minutes, institutional/organizational mission and vision information, CVs & resumes, partnership products)
  • Survey – demographic data and open ended questions – also questions about institutional/organizational context?
  • Interviews
  • Focus Group (is there a way to link specific demonstrated DemTech elements to focus group questions? For example, if the partnership has a high degree of inclusivity it would be helpful to acknowledge that and ask how it was decided - and by whom – to admit people into the partnership.
/ Must decide how to select a partnership – an information rich partnership (Patton?) that exhibits a number of elements of democratic and technocratic engagement.
Must scan documents quickly to see if they’re relevant; choose only those that contribute to answering the questions
Find out who needs to get survey, use that to inform interview selection decisions
Must decide on key participants so that they are the ones that are brought together for a focus group which will help to generate their discussion of the conditions / SOFAR (Students, Organization staff/leaders, Faculty, Administrators, and Residents) that are central to the partnership. Use snowball sampling to identify people who were important to the partnership but who may not be considered core members.
Important to avoid total repeat between interview questions and focus group questions. / This question seems exploratory to me – maybe I can use Enos and Morton’s suggested conditions as the start of a coding guide, but I will also need to let other conditions that are specific to that partnership emerge in the coding process. Enos and Morton’s conditions seem to be stilted to the higher ed context (i.e. faculty identity change) and I am also interested in capturing conditions that exist within the community context.
Research Questions / Theoretical or Literature Review Assumptions / Data Collection Methods / Selection Decisions / Data Sources / Analytic Considerations or kinds of analysis
How do stakeholders describe the roles and processes expected of them within community-university partnerships that occur within a Democratic Engagement framework? Technocratic Engagement? / Diverse community and university stakeholders interacting in the same problem-solving domain (Saltmarsh et al); equal-status solution generators (Saltmarsh et al); knowledge producers (Clayton et al); each has unique capabilities that are contributed (Dewey, 1916); “inclusive, collaborative, and problem-oriented work in which academics share knowledge-generating tasks with the public and involve community partners as participants in public problem-solving” (Saltmarsh et al., 2009, p. 9); Reciprocal collaborations (Saltmarsh et al) / Document review (meeting minutes, project/partnership products)
Survey – open ended questions?
Interviews
Focus Group / Assuming the selection decisions identified above have been made, I’ll have a partnership selected and the right people selected.
This selection decision is how to find a few key questions to ask about these descriptions and expectations. / SOFAR (Students, Organization staff/leaders, Faculty, Administrators, and Residents) that are central to the partnership. Use snowball sampling to identify people who were important to the partnership but who may not be considered core members. / The roles and processes of democratic engagement (and as a result Technocratic engagement) are very clearly spelled out and can give a nice coding framework.
I suspect that the information revealed in the individual interviews and surveys might differ from the understanding revealed in the focus group. I don’t expect they would have ever discussed their roles as a group before.
How are community and university stakeholders empowered to adopt roles and processes that are characteristic of partnerships that occur within a Democratic Engagement framework? Technocratic Engagement? / The process by which laypersons, or community stakeholders, come to experience the reciprocal role of knowledge-producer and equality of respect of their lay-knowledge (Saltmarsh etal., 2009) is unexplained. Empowerment theory (the spirit of fairness, equality, and respect invite community participation in the collaborative approach and create the necessary conditions for empowerment, or the “equitable distribution of power,” (Prilleltensky, 1994, p. 367) in the relationship) and elements of dialogic action (Freire, 1970 and Miller and Hafner, 2008) could be helpful. Of particular importance to the framework of democratic engagement are faith in humankind and critical thinking. The dialogic element of faith in humankind promotes value for community expertise. The dialogic element of critical thinking situates our attempts at solution generation to address a failed system rather than target a person’s individual failings. / Document review (meeting minutes, project/partnership products)
Interviews
Focus Group
(no survey?) / Do I use one faculty, CP, and student as emblematic of these processes or do I use the full lot of individuals who have been selected? / Same as above. / The theoretical assumptions give a very nice start to a coding framework, but they could be limiting if I don’t pay attention to how other empowerment or “becoming” processes emerged in this specific context.
Perhaps I need to move away from using empowerment theory and faith in people at the beginning of the analysis so that my codes are more inductive.