Methods

From The Peopling of New York City

New York Public Library, Port Richmond Branch, Staten Island, NY (Source: Wikimedia Commons).

Research Methods

In creating this Wiki site about the Cultural Communities of Staten Island, we employed a variety of research methods. Below, you will find a discussion of each process, as well as links to the assignments we completed as part of our research.

Demographic Research

Census Regions and Divisions (Source: Wikimedia Commons).

Most of the demographic research we conducted for this site depended on gathering and analyzing quantitative data from the U.S. Census. This presented specific challenges for each community studied; the particular difficulties encountered for each community appears in the Demographics section of each community's page.

The sources for demographic information about Staten Island included:

In looking at the data contained in these resources, were were interested in several questions: how does Staten Island compare to the rest of New York City? how has the demography of Staten Island changed over time, especially in the period since 1990?

As part of the data-gathering process, we completed Source Study #2: "Parsing the Demography of Staten Island."

Reviewing the Literature

New York Public Library, 1908 (Source: Wikimedia Commons).

In order to understand the state of research about each of the communities, we conducted a review of the literature. Using the College of Staten Island/CUNY's Library website, we conducted searches in the following databases: WorldCat; Academic Search Complete; Project Muse; Jstor; and Ethnic Newswatch.

In order to aid our research, we conducted keyword searches and also identified Library of Congress Subject Headings which would lead us to the scholarly literature on our communities. Then we were able to create two bibliographies: first, a representative bibliography of research that addresses the community in Staten Island, in New York City, or in the U.S.; and second, a representative bibliography of research that addresses the community before emigration from its home country. These results are included under "Readings" on the community pages.

By reading research selected from these two bibliographies, we were then able to discuss "both shores" of the community's experiences in the home country and in the local environment. This allowed us to complete Source Study #3: "Review of Literature on The Chosen Ethnic Community."

Participant-Observer Ethnography

Carl Linnaeus Returns from His Fieldwork, Dressed as a Laplander (Source: [1]).

Another research method we used is participant-observer ethnography. We visited a cultural institution (such as a restaurant, grocery store, community center, or church/synagogue/mosque/temple), and wrote about the experience. We were interested in examining the ways in which the cultural institutions, which we termed "Ethnic Stages," provided locations in which members of each community could identify themselves as members: to re-connect to community traditions, meet others from the community, take part in community rituals and rites, and otherwise "perform" their community identity. Further, we examined these "Ethnic Stages" as meeting points between members of the community and non-members, where people who are not already part of the community can learn about and interact with the cultural practices that define the community.

The information gathered from this process added human meaning to the demographic data and the scholarly literature that we had gathered about each community. This allowed us to complete Source Study #4: "Participant-Observer Ethnography for a Chosen Ethnic Cultural Institution."

Ethnographic Interviews

The most challenging part of our research centered on conducting interviews with members of each community. When possible, we used videography and photography to record our interviews, with the focus on asking the interview subjects about what their community meant to them. These interviews appear under the "Conversations" menu, and are also linked from each community page.

These interviews had the aim of allowing us to understand the ways that individual experiences mesh and/or conflict with the larger community’s experiences as reflected in other forms of data. We also set out to produce a cultural sketch of several representative individuals in order to make human the experiences of the community as a whole. In order to examine the relationship of the individual to the larger community, we strove for diversity in our interviewees, in terms of gender, age, and other factors. This process of interviewing allowed us to complete Source Study #5: "Ethnographic Interviews."

Research Ethics

All of the student researchers who took part in building this Wiki site completed CITI certification for conducting Human Subjects Research, and read CUNY Human Research Protections Program Policies and Procedures (2009).