“From the Bottom-up”
From the Bottom-up: The ParticipatoryIntergenerational Assessment of Neighborhood Conditions for Children
Roger Hart (Children's Environments Research Group, CUNY
Graduate Center)
Pamela Wridt (Children's Environments
Research Group, CUNY Graduate Center)
Bijan Kimiagar (Children's Environments Research Group, CUNY Graduate
Center)
Sruthi Atmakur-Javdekar (Children's Environments
Research Group, CUNY Graduate Center)
The most common method for assessing neighborhood conditions for children at the local level has been household surveys. These surveys are typically carried out with a random sample of households through interviews with heads of households. Data is collected and analyzed by professionals as a basis for planning with little involvement of adult residents. It is even more rare for children to be invited to give their perspectives, though there are some valuable exceptions to this. Participatory action research is typically used, with small groups of children or youth using multiple methods that enable them to powerfully critique neighborhood conditions from their perspective. However, in planning for sustainable development, we need an approach that is inclusive of all families and which reveals the inequities within a neighborhood, not just the inequities between neighborhoods. We need detailed disaggregated data that speaks to the strengths and needs within a community regarding conditions for children with different abilities, gender, and age. The Children’s Environments Research Group has worked for more than a decade to design research that adopts a middle road between qualitatively rich children's participatory action research and the more comprehensive and representative use of household surveys. Through a series of projects with UNICEF and international NGO partners in many countries, we have engaged children, youth, and adults in neighborhood assessment and cross-generational dialog as a basis for local advocacy for environmental change and for communication with decision- makers, planners, and designers. Through examples of this work carried out in different physical settings and cultures this paper describes the challenges of finding ways to analyze data in a manner that is bothunderstood by residents and is convincing to decision-makers, planners, and designers.
Learning Goals:
Distinguish between different approaches to the community assessment of conditions for children, from traditional household survey approaches to participatory action research.
Learn how the participatory intergenerational assessment approach offered in the paper adopts a middle-road between qualitatively rich children's participatory action research and the more comprehensive and representative use of household surveys.
Understand the original rationale for developing an approach that would be valuable in the planning of “child friendly cities”, how it has been broadened to be useful for the assessment of conditions in a range of types of “child friendly places”, and for enabling the popular “community scorecards” approach to work more effectively with children and youth.
Learn about the key components of the method and the opportunities and challenges of adopting it.
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