Community through the eyes of children: blending child-centered research and qualitative geovisulization

Abstract

Community is an ambiguous concept, and the meanings of community as a subject of study have received a great deal of attention across various disciplines. This paper discusses how children's diverse meanings of community shape and are shaped by the social, cultural, and physical environments of their everyday lives. To explore these meanings I combine principles of child-centered research and qualitative geovisualization into a research methodology. I demonstrate that this integration displays the transformative nature of qualitative analysis and visualization to support interpretive analysis of various forms of qualitative and spatial data together, and offers us a hybrid methodological framework for gaining insights into the diverse meanings of community held by the children. The main case study is drawn from a multi-year research collaboration called the Children's Urban Geography (ChUG), in which I participated along with children who lived in a relatively poor but emerging multi-cultural Hispanic neighborhood in Buffalo, NY.

Keywords:

• child-centered research
• qualitative geovisualization
• community
• meanings of community
• mixed-methods research

Acknowledgements

I thank participating children for their contribution, acceptance, and engagement. I am especially grateful for the insightful input and continuous support from Sarah Elwood, Jason Young, Pamela Quiroz, the editor, and anonymous reviewers for their detailed guideline and thoughtful comments. Lastly, I would like to dedicate this paper to Jae-Yu Ha who I respected the most.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

I thank Meghan Cope for the tremendous support through her NSF-funded Children's Urban Geographies project [Grant #BCS 99-84876] that I could participate in as a student, an assistant, and a researcher.

Notes

1. For more information about the ChUG project, see Cope (2008a, 2009) and Cope and Latcham (2009). This research was primarily conducted at one of the clubs offering an after-school program. A total of 50 children, 24 boys and 26 girls, participated in the research.

2. During the three years of research experience with children, the first year was truly dedicated to rapport building as a homework helper and club volunteer.

3. For more detailed discussions of the structure and functions of the system, see Jung (2009). Since the focus of this article is to provide a full account of children's conceptualizations of community, I do not fully illustrate the details of the qualitative geovisualization system I developed.

4. In the case of Buffalo, NY, the ‘Community Studies’ section is entirely included in ‘Social Science Studies’ curriculum. Social Studies curriculum data are based on New York State Education Department public curricula data. Additional information was provided by the New York Geography Alliance (NYGA) website (http://www.buffalo.state.edu/nyga/).

5. All participating children's names are pseudonyms to protect their identities.

6. This might be considered to be an example of institutional racism in education where non-white students often have little control over public learning, and school knowledge is understood as a set of tasks to do separate from their localized cultural knowledge (Fine and Weis 2003; Kraftl, Horton, and Tucker 2012; Sleeter and Grant 1991; Silva 2012).

7. Laptops had a particular meaning to children. They have, in fact, a very different meaning from ‘computer'. Abi especially has a ‘fantasy’ about laptops in her own words. She believed that a laptop never freezes, whereas a computer often does. This made me carry more laptops than I planned. This also demonstrates that this research was conducted prior to the era of mass ownership by this age group of digital devices such as iPads.

8. A single-use disposable camera was the most practical choice at the time of research.

9. I developed children's photos as soon as they gave to me. It was quite a palpable moment to look at the developed photos together, and also see their excitement to surprise in having had developed photos.

10. Google launched its web mapping service, Google Map in 2006.

11. Digitizing refers the process of converting an analog data into digital format in a computer.

12. I used ATLAS.ti, one of the most popular Computer-Aided Qualitative Data Analysis Software, to create the Network View for each child.

13. Interview with Abi on 11 May 2006. Abi's sketch of a big cake with a candle is included in Network View in Figure 3.

14. Children explained what ‘plátano’ is. They said it is something like a banana but smaller and its color is greener. Children showed a strong pride in their ethnic food.

15. Field note on 19 June 2006.

16. When I asked this question, of course, I assumed she would say, ‘Yes'.

17. Not all stacked images are visible in the Imagined Grid because only one image is viewable in two-dimensional map. Jona picked and placed the most significant photo at the top.

18. Coding methods identified key categories and themes that emerged from all of the collected data, and the significance of their content is often illustrated by codes and the relationships among them. As a partial evidence of the potential effectiveness of qualitative geovisualization, the number and frequency of codes related to the meanings of community have been increased in the qualitative geovisualization stage compared to the prior stage.