Listening to our communities, but what about the data?

Kerem Inal
Sep 8, 2018 · 4 min read

Listing and observing are two of the main skills I learned as an anthropologist, and to be able to use this in Social Journalism is truly wonderful!

Listening

Listening was very much part of my undergraduate study. I did a study on the Demoscene Subculture (a computer subculture that was formed in the late 1970’s that currently does “art” with nostalgic computers such as the Commodore 64 and the Amiga) and for this study, I went to 3 of their events they call parties. This was a great place for me to understand the specifics of listening and observing. I spent a week at each event I went to. Slept in the same space as the community ate the same food and tried to understand their culture as much as I could. Listening and Observing were the two main tools I used while engaging with the group. I had no prior experience to the events, so everything I heard and saw was fascinating to me. In anthropology we learn to extract the stories of people’s lives, every person has his/her own view of life and his own path. This is very important in anthropology, understanding that each individual person is different yet somehow connected with all of the people in the community. My first question was; What brought you here? What is your story? These questions allowed me to get a deeper understanding of the people within the community. It allowed me to enter their worldviews and see what life was like for them. With listening being so important, questions are as important as listening. The ability to come up with questions while the interview is going on, the ability to understand the body language of the interviewee and the ability to form a bond, a genuine bond, with the person are very important in understanding a community.

During my research, I wasn’t able to use quantitative research as much as I would have liked. I was an undergraduate and no one really took me that seriously. I did incorporate some data that I found, but none that I did on my own. I did feel as the data was missing, but there was nothing I could have done at the time.

I want to use these same techniques in journalism. I want to be a good interviewer, but I also want to form a bond with the person/community, I want to see life from his/her perspective, I want to incorporate my observations in my reporting. The things I observe are very important in understanding a community. A genuine interaction between two community members, or a fight, a look, a kiss, a hug all of these are very important data’s that I can get from a community and will help me understand how the community works. in addition to all this, I do think data is important in understanding a community.

We had our second Community Engagement class the other day. We all were put into groups and tried to think of a project that we could do in Mott Haven, Bronx. Our group did come up with a plan of sorts, but we understood that before we could get a plan out, we needed to talk to our community, we needed to see their problems ourselves and then form a plan. We plan on going there Monday to understand the environment and the situation there.

Qualitative and Quantitative

During our second class, there was a small discussion about surveys. How surveys aren’t good for research and don’t represent the community as is. We talked a bit about how surveys depend on how the questions were asked and ultimately categorize people. (sorry if I don’t remember this correctly, but it was something like this) I do accept all of these, but I also love surveys. This is a topic that has been argued at length during my undergrad and even during my days working as an ethnographer. Surveys do tend to categorize people, it does do that, but, I think it is a very important and practical way of understanding your community as a whole. When I say surveys, I’m not only talking about surveys but Quantitative research methods in general. I do not believe that Quantitative research methods alone can give a complete picture of a community, but I see benefits of it. Data collection, understanding the data and interpreting the data with the qualitative data in hand is important. Data can put people into categories, it needs to categorize to form a structure, these categories are not always true or accurate and that is where Qualitative research comes in to play. If these two methods are combined, then we can actually get a good picture of our community. We might find discrepancies, or correlations which can help out with our research. Big Data is booming, everything we do is now data. Where we walk, whom we talk to, how much exercise we do, everything we do can be data, and I think all of this data must be used during qualitative research, Journalism. I do believe that as journalists we must use this data to help understand our community, not to categorize, but to add to our findings.

I would love to talk more about this subject. For now, I do believe that qualitative and quantitative research must go together, but I might be wrong!

Kerem Inal

Written by

Anthropologist. Social Journalism class of 2019 — Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY