Livable Communities: Methodology of the Livable Communities Research Project

The information on this page is provided for researchers and others interested in more detail about the project.

• What Are the Guiding Principles Behind the Project?
• How Was the Survey Designed and the Winning Communities Selected?
• Who Comprised the Sample?
• What Is the Bias in the Sample?
• Who Is on the Advisory Committee?
• Whom Can I Contact for More Information?

What Are the Guiding Principles Behind the Project?

The researchers would like to make explicit our values relevant to this project. First and foremost, we are committed to the principle of achieving community integration. From the start we realized that the project could be misinterpreted, or even misused, in ways which run counter to that commitment. That would occur if the project were seen as urging all people who are blind or visually impaired to move to a limited set of places. Another threat to that commitment occurs when we encounter respondents who express support for services that segregate them, for example, apartment buildings for blind persons, or expanded para-transit. Obviously we must and do report data as we find them, but we do accept the responsibility of "advocacy research" to state the intended objectives of the research. As the next section explains, these goals are further sustained by working in a Participatory Action Research (PAR) mode.

How Was the Project Conducted?

This research was conducted using a "Participatory Action Research" (PAR) model. PAR is a process in which those who are experiencing a problematic situation in a community participate collaboratively with trained researchers in deciding what information is needed, in collecting and analyzing information, and in taking action to manage, improve, or contribute to a just and sustainable society. In other words, the research participants engage in every phase of the project (research design, data collection, and dissemination of the results). Importantly, goals of the project must include action components. To learn more about PAR, visit the following web resources:

http://home.interlog.com/~krogh/Krogh/Pg105.html

Here is a list of other types of PAR projects in the field of rehabilitation:

http://www.naric.com/search/t34.html

In keeping with the PAR approach, the Livable Communities Project established a national advisory committee of 17 individuals to determine the direction of the research and guide the dissemination of the results. All but one adviser is blind or visually impaired, or the parent of a young child or children who are blind.

Moreover, the design itself was built to elicit the voices of individuals in shaping the data collection instruments. The initial data collection phase used focus groups, organized by life stage, and informal interviews, as qualitative approaches to learning about the types of criteria and ways of thinking about them that people use.

From those discussions we drafted an initial standardized survey, using both open-ended and structured answer opportunities. We conducted surveys online, by email, or by phone with 200 participants, gathering their views on criteria of community livability, and good and bad examples of what makes a community livable.

The "action" aspect of PAR that we aim for is enhanced advocacy by people who are blind or visually impaired for features that promote livability at the community level; we hope to support those efforts by researching and reporting effective examples of those features. This research is a step towards imagining, and eventually building, more livable communities. A key feature of our project is to announce "winning" communities based on our research findings. We hope that the competition will become an annual event, thus creating a growing substantive database, but also allowing us to expand and refine the research and action methods over time.

How Was the Survey Designed and the Winning Communities Selected?

In the survey, participants were asked open-ended questions about what features were important in making somewhere "livable." They were then asked to identify the single most important and second most important features of the environment (built, social, or cultural) that enabled "livability." Respondents were also asked about personal or individual factors that may shape how they perceive whether somewhere is livable. Lastly, participants were asked to tell us what environmental features existed in their local communities, and whether they wanted to nominate where they lived as an example of a "livable community." (For more detail on the questions asked, please see the survey).

AFB's Policy Research and Program Evaluation (PRPE) department reviewed the data on each local community that had been nominated. We also developed a list of the most important environmental features, based on the information provided from the participants.

We then eliminated any communities that did not possess accessible public transportation (because it was rated so highly) and that lacked more than one other important environmental feature. There were 15 places remaining. The PRPE department wrote brief cases, highlighting the advantages of each of the "finalists," and presented the "cases for places" to the Advisory Committee. The Advisory Committee voted on their Top 5, and PRPE staff tabulated the results.

Who Comprised the Sample?

We received over 200 completed surveys in 2002-2003. Our sample is 43% male and 57% female. Just over 60% of the sample was composed of individuals of "working age"; older adults or seniors represent slightly over one-quarter of our sample; students and parents of blind children constitute the rest.

The data come from individuals relatively easily accessible to researchers, including workers in the field of blindness services, activists in consumer groups, users of online listservs, and the like. We made a concerted effort to reflect the diversity of individuals in the United States, paying particular attention to geographic regions (West, Midwest, Northeast, and South, as defined by the Census Bureau), different sized communities (urban/metropolitan versus small town/rural), severity of impairment, type of mobility aid used (long cane, guide dog, or neither), and diversity of race/ethnicity, gender and life stage.

What Is the Bias in the Sample?

The sample in this pilot phase is biased towards higher educational and economic status. There is additionally an under-representation of youth in our sample (referring to the perspective of parents on the needs of their young children, and to teenagers and college students reporting for themselves).

In the future, we will aim for greater participation by people who are multiply-impaired, and people who are least likely to be connected to traditional blindness systems because they live in rural areas, or because they are newly-blinded, and are less likely to be sophisticated technology users. We will also seek greater ethnic and racial diversity.

Who Is on the Advisory Committee?

A complete list of Advisory Committee members and their biographical sketches can be found here.

Whom Can I Contact for More Information?

For more information, contact:

Elaine Gerber, Ph.D.
Senior Research Associate
Policy Research and Program Evaluation Department

American Foundation for the Blind
11 Penn Plaza, Suite 300
New York, NY 10001

Phone: 212-502-7644
Fax: 212-502-7773
E-mail: gerber@afb.net

Or

Corinne Kirchner, Ph.D.
Director, Policy Research and Program Evaluation
American Foundation for the Blind

Phone: 212-502-7640
Fax: 212-502-7773
E-mail: corinne@afb.net