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Course Description

Organizations and social movements can perform their own research to advance equitable community change. They can discover, collect, use, and disseminate data to support their projects and goals. But any raw data requires processing for it to become useful, valuable information. Such processing includes selective extraction, organization, analysis, and formatting. This processing allows data to reach its potential as powerful and persuasive information. This course introduces you to the processes by which data is analyzed and converted from raw resources into valuable information and knowledge.

The first step of gathering data relevant for an equitable community change project is to clearly formulate the questions you would like to try to answer using data. In this course, you begin by developing strong research questions about a community’s social, economic, and environmental conditions and how those conditions change over time. You will then examine how to gather or find reliable data, and make a plan to do so in order to answer a research question. Next, you will discover some basic data analysis techniques and determine whether those techniques could be used to help you answer a research question. Finally, you will reflect on the importance of becoming a critical consumer of data analyses and evaluate data analysis examples.

Faculty Author

Russell Weaver

Benefits to the Learner

  • Write strong research questions relevant to a social or community change project
  • Plan for how you will obtain data relevant for answering one of your research questions
  • Identify data analysis techniques appropriate for testing a given hypothesis
  • Evaluate a data analysis

Target Audience

  • Activists and community development organizers and practitioners
  • Policy makers and political staff
  • Public interest lawyers and advocates
  • Leaders and members of organized labor organizations
  • Urban planners and strategic planning agencies
  • Social workers
  • Grant writers
  • Educators
  • People interested in engaging in community change

Applies Towards the Following Certificates

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Cornell ILR School
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