Collecting and Analyzing Community Data

Studying contemporary life is only useful if a developer can actually gather the information and make sense of it. Gathering data about the activities, needs, and problems of contemporary life can feel demanding and confusing, so it helps to know the standard methods and the levels at which the data should be read.

Methods of collecting data

The most commonly used methods for gathering information about contemporary life are:

1. Observation of the behaviour of individuals and social groups.
2. Analysis of media, such as newspapers and magazine articles, which reveal what a society is paying attention to.
3. Exploring the ideas of prominent thinkers about the important issues of the day.
4. Sociological surveys of communities.
5. Activity analyses of the various activities individuals perform.
6. Job analyses for a variety of vocations.

Together these reach contemporary life from several directions at once: what people do, what the media discusses, what thinkers argue, and what jobs require.

Flashcard

Name three methods for collecting data about contemporary life.

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Answer

Observation, analysis of media, and job analyses

The fuller set adds exploring prominent thinkers’ ideas, sociological surveys of communities, and activity analyses. Each reaches contemporary life from a different direction.

The three levels of analysis

For analysing contemporary life, a developer uses materials of wide variety and several methods of investigation, but the analysis happens at three levels.

1. Nationwide. National data are often already available and can guide objectives on national affairs, indicating critical social, political, and economic problems, as well as data in general areas such as music, art, and aesthetic life.
2. Community-wide. Data collected at the community level. A key efficiency: this is collected once for the community and does not need to be repeated for each school within it.
3. Area served by one school. Information gathered from the specific area a particular school serves, including additional information needed for a group of people within the school, such as the health needs of particular ethnic or social groups, drawn from the records of public and private organizations.

Flashcard

What are the three levels at which contemporary life is analyzed?

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Answer

Nationwide, community-wide, and the area served by one school

National data guides objectives on national affairs; community data is gathered once for all its schools; the area level supplies the local detail a particular school needs for its own groups.

Reading the data with care

The final step is interpretation, and it carries the same warning as the study of learners. Any set of data may allow multiple interpretations. A single statistic can suggest different objectives to different readers, so a developer must not seize on one figure in isolation.

The suggestion that follows is to assemble all the data and analyse it collectively before drawing out any implication for educational objectives. A community study of health, for example, would gather morbidity and mortality statistics, any past public health surveys, studies of nutritional status, and records of malnutrition and related diseases, at least five different kinds of data, and then analyse and interpret them together. One figure on its own can mislead; the whole picture, read together, is what points reliably to objectives.

Flashcard

What is the rule for interpreting community data?

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Answer

Assemble all the data and analyze it collectively before inferring objectives

Any single figure can be read several ways, so a developer gathers several kinds of data, for example five kinds of health data, and reads the whole picture together rather than seizing on one statistic.