More than noise: Employing hip-hop music to inform community development practice

Abstract

The quality of information which a community development professional has access to will limit her ability to understand the issues, concerns, and desires of a community. Artistic expression, specifically hip-hop music, can provide a novel level of understanding of community dynamics to community development practice and research. This research established a methodology that would enable practitioners and researchers to effectively extract relevant details embedded within hip-hop music. We employed a microanalysis approach to study 100 hip-hop songs to extract the relevant themes and codes. We found key relationships in the music between the artists and how they relate to their physical surroundings.

Keywords:

• Community art
• hip-hop
• microanalysis
• practitioners

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Atlas.ti assists researchers in conducting content analysis by helping to organize, filter, and sort rich qualitative data through keywords.

2. To clarify the hierarchy of the subgroups and codes in future discussions, the nomenclature is as follows: Police (Subgroup: Actor), meaning, the code “Police” is part of the subgroup (Subgroup: Actor).