Previously, we began our situated project at the top of the hourglass. Our goal this week was to move down the hourglass and forward in our project. Before getting too ahead of ourselves, our group revisited our framing and focus questions and decided they needed some refining. We explored both our framing and focused research again in order to realign the two.
New and Improved Questions
Our original framing question was “How does class influence one’s relationship with the environment?” It has now evolved to “How do class and environment interact?” The wording of our new question frees us from a potentially problematic cause and effect relationship that we feared might have trapped us in harmful or limiting assumptions. We also sought to avoid finding proof for conclusions we’d already come to. Our focus questions remain:
- “How do caste and environment interact/intersect in India?”
- “Is one’s environment in India predetermined by caste? How? Which aspects?
- “How does being a member of a ‘scheduled caste’ affect one’s environment?”
Methodology
We believe that a survey about regional environmental values would be a key piece of our methodology if we were to carry out this project. As the designers of this survey, we have the ability to control most of the variables in the situation, except for the crucial information we are looking to obtain from participants. This will set ourselves up to obtain data that help us answer our specific question. The powerful qualitative data we can collect from a survey will allow us to analyze what we found and derive subsequent conclusions.
We would like to conduct both a widespread numerical-based survey similar to the one conducted by the World Values Survey and a more conversational or interview-based survey that highlights personal narratives. By combining the two, we are ensuring that multiple types of data will be on hand when we begin an analysis. This allows for security within the research and the overlap will make the conclusions stronger as it might highlight similarities and discrepancies between both survey response types.
Below are examples of questions we would like to ask in our survey(s):
- On a scale of 1-5 (I do not identify – I strongly identify), how do you identify with the following statement?
- “I live in a healthy environment.”
- Describe the environment in which you live.
- Is it possible to be healthy in the environment in which you live?
By asking people what they think, we hope to steep ourselves in the regional differences that we touched on above. Without a survey, the best we can do is use data that are already out there that may leave us unable to pursue our question. We do not wish to approximate, average, or assume how people might respond, especially because our worldviews are limited to what we have been previously exposed to in mainstream, “western” culture.
We created a preliminary GIS map which shows Yale EPI’s Environmental Performance scores (a measure of countries’ environmental status) alongside World Bank income group data. This map takes a step toward our end goal but because the generalized nature of the country level data it uses limits its ability to answer the questions we are interested in. We hope to obtain data from as many regions in India as possible.
Our project seeks to measure people’s beliefs about the environment they are living in while measuring regional environmental changes in order to analyze them both. These two variables influence each other in an unknown number of ways and we want to zoom in on that intersection.
The above methods, along with the research in our Zotero library, will help us explore our framing question in context.
As we continue along the hourglass and past this exploration of potential methods, there are a few factors that still need developing. One of these is our data on the environment. As shown in the map above, country-level data is more accessible than data that is directly relevant to our project. This missing statistical and qualitative data is exactly what we would like to collect ourselves, perhaps by mimicking the EPI on a smaller, regional scale, using indicators specific to our situated context, or anecdotally.
Potential Project Implications
Grace Anderson 