2. The academic gaze
• “For years and years we have had people
coming in from outside to find out what’s
wrong with us, how we live, and what makes
us so criminal”
• “The strange visitor was coming to question
the usefulness of our insalubrious existence”
• Jeremy Brent ( 2009) Searching for Community: Representation, Power and Action on an Urban Estate
3. Edward Said
• “Perhaps the most important fact
of all would be...to ask how one
can study [represent or act with]
other cultures and peoples from a
libertarian, or a non-repressive
and non-manipulative
perspective” p63
Would those being written about
{ recognise my account of them? }
4. Objectives
• What do YOU think is the purpose of
community profiling?
• Which definition of community profiling do
you prefer?
5. Scope
• Where does this profile end?
– Geographical
• where are the boundaries? What is/is not Spring
Boroughs? Where does it connect/differ from nearby
neighbourhoods?
– Topics
• what social policies are important right now?
– What have you SEEN in the fieldwork?
– Will it represent the community you are profiling?
6. What is your Research Question?
• Open ended question
– we are not sure, yet, what we know and what we
don’t know
• Exploratory
– comparing ‘what we think we know’ with ‘what we
are seeing/hearing in the field’
• What are the key features of Far Cotton that
contribute to it’s successes and failures and what
issues/challenges might best contribute to its
improvement
7. Epistemology
• What is knowledge? How is knowledge
acquired?
• Philosophy of science in a nutshell
critical realism Roy Bhaskar is the
positivism theory that some of our sense-data (for social constructionism
example, those of primary qualities) can Berger and Luckmann
Auguste Comte and do accurately represent external
Positivism states that argue that all knowledge,
objects, properties, and events, while including the most basic,
the only authentic other of our sense-data (for example,
knowledge is that which taken-for-granted common
those of secondary qualities and sense knowledge of
allows positive perceptual illusions) do not accurately
verification everyday reality, is derived
represent any external objects, from and maintained by
properties, and events social interactions.
8. Methodology/Method
• Methodology
– the analysis of the principles of methods, rules, and
claims employed by a discipline
– a pretentious substitute for the word method
• Method
• What you actually did, when and how, to collect
data for your study
• Methodology
• Your justification for why your method was the
best way of collecting the right data
9. Data
• Qualitative and Quantitative
• Mixed methods
• How certain am I?
• TRIANGULATION
I see an object I hear a story
I read some data
12. reasoned argument
• ‘showing your grasp of ideas’.
• you are showing that you can take hold of the ideas and
organise them to do some work for you
– your claim (proposition, thesis, point, position) - your point of
view, what you believe;
– your reason(s) (explanations)- why you believe what you do;
– your evidence (support or grounds) – your primary observations
, secondary data and examples that support your point of view;
and
– your argument (warrant) - how the evidence you have provided
leads to the claim your are making.
• This is ‘threaded’ throughout the WHOLE document
• Make sure reader knows exactly what is going on at each
point in the narrative
13. Taking a stance
• it is not enough to simply describe a situation
or recall the facts, you need to take a stance or
position yourself in relation to the situation or
the facts.
• Previous studies (Jones, 1997; Smith, 2006) have indicated that the intensity of physiotherapy
provision may affect some patient outcomes including reduced mortality following a stroke.
• Critical community development
• Our work is the ‘practice of freedom’ (Freire,
1976) not maintenance of the status quo,
• http://www.infed.org/community/critical_community_development.htm
