Organizing projects are centered upon the social and political power of participants. As such, I initially aimed to collaboratively co-investigate the aforementioned research questions with five urban youth organizers through a range of qualitative data collection methods during the first half of 2012. In doing so, I sought to explore the ways in which participants constitute their experience as they actively engage in activism and social action projects. In the following section, I describe the selection of the research participants and context of the study. I then describe in greater detail the methods for data collection and the limitations to this approach.
3.3.1 Research Setting and Participants
The study focused exclusively on a small sample of urban youth activists who were all
participants of Global Kids' Human Rights Activist Project (HRAP) when they were in high school and who are still involved in activist projects at their colleges and/or in their
communities. The Human Rights Activist Project is the youth organizing component of Global Kids (GK), a community-based non-profit organization in New York City. HRAP is a program that fuses social action techniques with GK's approach to positive youth development,
supporting youth to lead human rights campaigns that impact policy, while equipping them with tools to become lifelong community leaders and activists. HRAP thus provides the historical background from within which this study emerged.
There are numerous other youth organizing project operating in this city and other urban areas in the Northeast (see Ishihara, 2007; Shah, 2011). I chose HRAP due to my personal experiences as an educator and facilitator in the program, when I observed youth engaging in critical learning while designing social action campaigns. Following Ginwright’s (2010b) post-structural ethnography, I aimed to interrogate youth organizing as personal and biographically specific (for both participants and researcher) while challenging assumptions around the essence of easy identifications as activist.
The diversity of participants in HRAP made it an ideal program for sampling a range of activist alumni from across demographic groups. Broadly speaking, the youth who participate in HRAP are racially, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse, and the majority of participants come from New York City neighborhoods and ethnic groups that are largely underrepresented at American universities and in many professional spheres. The majority of participants in the program identify themselves as African American, Latino, South Asian, Middle Eastern, East Asian or Caribbean, and most attend schools with poor attendance and low graduation rates, in under-served and politically marginalized communities (Global Kids, 2011).
The participant sample was selected purposefully to include youth who could understand what Hatch (2002) called the “transformative intent” of research designed to encourage political action. Purposeful sampling is common in qualitative research as researchers push back against the notion of a “representative sample” of any group in favor of selection based on criteria – such as shared characteristics, settings or activities (Maxwell 2005; Patton 1990). While purposeful sampling evokes criticism as lacking objectivity, it can serve to capture heterogeneity in context.
The sample of participants I drew from are individuals who were all members of HRAP when they were in public high schools in NYC, and thus have that shared historical
organizational context from which to speak about their past, present, and future instantiations of activism. Specific participants were selected through a process of snowball sampling (Patton, 1990) to access a diverse sample of individuals by ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation and religion – reflecting at least a fragment of a cross-section of urban youth activists (Shah, 2011).
In order to map the articulation of themselves as activists through the critically literate praxis of organizing, this study employed qualitative data collection methods detailed below.
3.3.2 Data Sources
In the initial design of this study, I aimed to conduct “critical auto/ethnographic research” with these youth organizers. Ethnographically, I designed this research to incorporate interviews, observations and artifact analysis. Due to limitations of access and proximity described in greater detail below, the study was restricted to qualitative interviews. Although this was not the original research design, it matches the caveat of “emergent design” that acknowledged that there could be shifts in the collection of data in negotiation with the participants of the study.
Interviews serve as a potent match for my “critical auto/ethnographic” overture of working alongside youth to have them self-reflectively explore their personal experience in connection to wider meaning.
Interviews
To understand the positions of these urban youth organizers as activists, data was collected predominantly through qualitative interview (Rubin & Rubin, 2005; Seidman, 1998).
Qualitative research with interviews serves to uncover the meaning that subjects ascribe to the structure of their experiences and their perspectives (Hatch, 2002). These interviews achieve the multiple outcomes Lincoln and Guba (1985) propose to answer qualitative research questions:
participants explain their motivations and activities in past and present events, self-reporting their emotional and intellectual responses to activist literacies by reconstructing memories, constructing experience and projecting futurity.
Interviews began upon IRB approval and continued through the late summer of 2012.
Each interview was semi-structured with ethnographic questions that were descriptive,
structural, and contrasting in order to explore emergent themes. The interviews were informal and dialogically responsive to the input of participants. On average, these conversations were approximately sixty to ninety minutes in length, and covered a host of themes around activist learning and organizing. Each interview was tape recorded and transcribed to identify how to further investigate and analyze emergent themes in-depth in future interviews. Following thorough transcription, the audio data was destroyed. Subsequent interview protocols were drafted upon analysis of the first round of interview answers to generatively extend our dialogue based on participant input and organically emergent topics. Over time, I expected that
participants would become better at talking in more sophisticated forms about their experiences.
As the researcher is the primary tool of research in qualitative research, I expected too that I would become better at listening to them as the study developed and answers emerged.
3.3.3 Limitations
There are many limitations to this study. The initial design as “critical auto/ethnographic” was proposed to ensure that this research allowed participants many levels of polyvocality.
Conducting observation and artifact analysis aligned with ethnographic overtures to
triangulation in order to improve confidence in research reporting (Hatch, 2002). Although I initially worked with participants to plan observations of them in workshops, trainings and campaign development sessions, there were limits to my ability to observe them in their organizing space.
The primary obstacle to conducting observations was around the idea of access. Most of the events in which they organized were in secure spaces within universities and/or within the homes of specific individuals. I spent more time with Vaga De Franx in public organizing spaces than any other participant. Gentle Meadows was outside of the city for much of the study, participating in activist pursuits in the context of closed-door shareholder spaces.
People’s Republic of Mars went abroad and was limited to dialoguing when he was occasionally back in New York. Awesome Woman and Green Strawberries were deeply
involved in the back channels of organizing, going to undisclosed locations with small groups to organize actions.
As qualitative interviews emerged as the primary data source, analysis of artifacts in the context of activist observation became less necessary. The interviews served as a re-telling and
reconstruction of the experiences of activist work, providing insight to answer the research questions. Dialoguing around approaches to literacy learning and articulations of activism produced rich data for polyvocal write-ups of each participant. While early stages of this design posited these write-ups as “portraits,” social scientific portraiture as designed by Lawrence-Lightfoot (1997) lacked the political force to allow for necessarily fragmented stories to be told.
Instead, findings are drafted in narrative excerpts that highlight critical literacy practices.