I’m busy trying to raise money for the Prince
George’s Information Commons, our project that helps local kids
use the Internet for civic purposes. There’s one specific grant opportunity
that I want to go after, and it has a Sept. 2 deadline.
Given the terms of the grant opportunity ("research in active
living"), I can imagine us doing these three things:
1. We could help kids to map the walkable streets, parks, and healthy
food sources of the r community, so that we can investigate whether
that kind of research makes adolescents more aware of health issues,
more prone to healthy behavior, and more civically engaged. Our method
would be to give them (and a control group) questionnaires both before
and after the course, and measure the change.
2. We could help kids to produce public documents—such as maps,
brochures, website materials—that advertise the health assets
in the community, and investigate whether these materials lead to positive
health outcomes in the school or community. Our method would be to give
students in a set of classes a questionnaire, then expose them to the
materials that our kids create, and then survey them again.
3. We could use the data that the kids collect to generate genuine
research findings of value to other communities.
I’m convinced that the funder actually wants #3, and it’s the hardest
item for me to conceive. We could say that we will collect baseline
data on walkability, nutritional quality, and crime, and use these data
for research purposes—but I doubt that that’s specific enough.
We could say that we will investigate whether proximity to healthy assets
correlates with good health, controlling for lots of stuff, but I’m
not sure that kind of correlational research is rigorous enough. We
could say that we will resurvey the neighborhood periodically to establish
how much change occurs in walkability and other health variables. But
I’m not sure how interesting the mere rate of change would be. Or we
could say that we will use specific changes in the community as "natural
experiments." But then I think we need to describe one likely change
that we will be able to investigate. I haven’t thought of one yet.