Product Details

Author Information

Corresponding Author
Mary Lutz
City College of New York
25 Broadway
7th Floor
New York, NY 10004
United States
p: 212-925-6625 x204
f: 212-925-6656
mlutz@ccny.cuny.edu

Authors (listed in order of authorship):
Delia Orantes
City College of New York

Product Description and Application Narrative Submitted by Corresponding Author

What general topics does your product address?

Public Health, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Social Work

What specific topics does your product address?

Access to health care, Community assessment, Community development, Community engagement, Economic development, Education, Employment, HIV/AIDS, Housing, Mental health, Minority health, Physical activity/exercise, Poverty, Sexual health, Social services, Substance use, Urban health, Workforce development, Community-based participatory research

Does your product focus on a specific population(s)?

Adolescents, Children, Seniors

What methodological approaches were used in the development of your product, or are discussed in your product?

Community needs assessment, Focus group , Quantitative research, Interview

What resource type(s) best describe(s) your product?

Evaluation tool, Service learning material

Application Narrative

1. Please provide a 1600 character abstract describing your product, its intended use and the audiences for which it would be appropriate.*

This document is a report of community-based participatory research conducted with Brooklyn (NY) Community Board 14 in the Spring 2009. This working and middle-class urban area was designated the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the nation by the US Bureau of the Census (2000). After the propossal received approval by the City College of New York Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, the Institutional Review Board and meetings with Community Board 14 staff and board members, the students from City College of NY Center for Worker Education, working with the Community Board, engaged in 522 interviews with residents, workers and adult students in randomly selected, representative census tracts. Differences among residents in how they identify their neighborhoods' social and health needs are revealed along ethnic, gender, religious and residential lines. Small focus groups were also held with teenagers living and going to school in the designated area.

The project report was written for the Brooklyn Community Board 14 and its constituents and may provide a single-semester service-learning model for conducting social needs assessments in a racially and economically diverse community.

2. What are the goals of the product?

The project itself was inspired by Dr. Lutz's conversations with longtime and more recent residents of the area who spontaneously offered a variety of perspectives on changes in their community's profile and offered their personal suggestions. As a service-learning project, students were to learn practical civic engagement, sampling and interviewing methodologies, acquire ease in approaching and conducting research interviews with persons of different ethnic backgrounds, and learn to clean data, analyze, write and discussing the survey findings. The goal of working with the Community Board was to create a survey of its residents that could be used to empirically argue for more rational, democratic redistribution of City Council funds. The survey's empirical findings could be used to help generate a socioeconomic framework for planning.

The product exemplifies the educational goal of familiarizing students with one method of using social science tools to obtain community sentiments in a culturally diverse urban environment and simultaneously working with a Community Board to obtain timely, useful data.

3. Who are the intended audiences or expected users of the product?

Community Board, and future classes engaged in the CCNY Community Needs Assessment course. The material can be modified and used by other small municipalities or subdivisions where similar methods are required to ensure the validity and reliability of survey results. The report includes the sampling map, survey tool and detailed descriptions of the sample and results, with the addition of student observations and comments on their learning experience.

4. Please provide any special instructions for successful use of the product, if necessary. If your product has been previously published, please provide the appropriate citation below.

5. Please describe how your product or the project that resulted in the product builds on a relevant field, discipline or prior work. You may cite the literature and provide a bibliography in the next question if appropriate.

In the language of Bringle and Hacker (1) this was a "prototype course" generated in a department that was mostly naïve to formal service-learning, but with an expressed enthusiasm for furthering its inclusion in the curricula. For example, five department members attended a workshop series on creating service-learning courses during the semester this needs assessment course was offered.

This community needs assessment methodology is a completely natural extension of traditional community survey methods, and draws its uniqueness from synthesizing that tradition with service-learning and civic engagement with an unusually diverse population. The instructor for the course has many years experience conducting social and health research under the auspices of government and community organizations in New York City. A more comprehensive community needs assessment modeled on that conducted by Perkins (2) service-learning course is in the planning stage. Such a course will include resource mapping, key informant interviews, surveys, etc., and will necessarily span more than one semester.

6. Please provide a bibliography for work cited above or in other parts of this application. Provide full references, in the order sited in the text (i.e. according to number order). .

(1) Bringle Robert G. Hatcher Julie A. Implementing Service Learning in Higher Education

Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 67, No. 2 (March/ April 1996):67-73


(2) Perkins Daniel F. Jones Kenneth. Comprehesive Community Assessment of Youth Development Opportunities. Available from http://www.resiliency.cas:psy.edu/PDFs/CCAYDO.pdf

7. Please describe the project or body of work from which the submitted product developed. Describe the ways that community and academic/institutional expertise contributed to the project. Pay particular attention to demonstrating the quality or rigor of the work:

• For research-related work, describe (if relevant) study aims, design, sample, measurement instruments, and analysis and interpretation. Discuss how you verified the accuracy of your data.
• For education-related work, describe (if relevant) any needs assessment conducted, learning objectives, educational strategies incorporated, and evaluation of learning.
• For other types of work, discuss how the project was developed and reasons for the methodological choices made.

The project was produced after the primary author's consultation with a social work colleague and other neighbors in the district; it was midwived through the Community Board 14 staff, and conducted with cooperation from a variety of community based organizations and public library branches. The project was unfunded, but supported by the City College and advised by the staff of the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies. Those who conducted the actual interviews were working adult students of the City College of New York who shared demographic characteristics of the neighborhood residents, but the students were not themselves residents of the area.
Students enrolled in a service-learning, 6-credit course conducted on Saturdays. Their training in the classroom was conducted by the instructor (author) and a member of the Community Board 14 staff. Briefings before and after field work were conducted by the instructor in a variety of Brooklyn CD14 locations. Students were required to create a weekly blog of their experiences in the field and were invited to CD14 Youth Services Committee meetings and events but attendance was not a course requirement.
Student learning was assessed through written assignments, discussions, feedback on videotaped practice interviews, and a final taped individual presentation. The Community Board was not involved in assessing individual students.

8. Please describe the process of developing the product, including the ways that community and academic/institutional expertise were integrated in the development of this product.

The study aims, design, and measurement instruments were developed with the Community Board staff, and with input from the community members of their Youth Services Committee. The training of interviewers and analyses were overseen by the Principle Investigator with assistance from Community Board staff members. Those methods are contained in the report itself. Without having a specific preconceived focus or agenda, the primary author of the final report first approached the staff of Community Board 14 to assess the feasibility of conducting a community needs assessment that might help CB14 members inform their policy and funding requests. The CB14 staff concluded that while all their constituents were important, targeting youth needs held more urgency for them than, for example, the elderly or disabled. The CB14 staff assisted with the general questionnaire to the extent that more questions related to youth were included than for any other age group. At the stage of data analysis and interpretation, the staff of CB14 provided the important north-south geographic boundary for that allowed for meaningful statistical analysis and could later be important for rationally siting new services.

9. Please discuss the significance and impact of your product. In your response, discuss ways your product has added to existing knowledge and benefited the community; ways others may have utilized your product; and any relevant evaluation data about impact, if available. If the impact of the product is not yet known, discuss its potential significance.

This was the first known formal survey of community needs to be conducted in this area. The results were provided promptly to the Community Board to fit the city's deadline for planning the budget for the next fiscal year. The Community Board 14 responses to the project and report have been extremely favorable. As a result of this project, the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies presented the 2009 "Excellence Award" to the primary author for "exceptional commitment to high quality service-learning." The report has gained attention beyond the Brooklyn neighborhood that was targetted; another New York City community (in Harlem) recently approached the first author about conducting a similar study there.

10. Please describe why you chose the presentation format you did.

The report was written for the members of the local Community Board and for the general public who participated in the survey. This is not an academic audience.

11. Please reflect on the strengths and limitations of your product. In what ways did community and academic/institutional collaborators provide feedback and how was such feedback used? Include relevant evaluation data about strengths and limitations if available.

The institutional partners (Community Board members and staff) collaborated throughout the project without attempting to direct its results. Community providers of youth services who operate outside the Community Board were consulted after the CB14 staff chose youth as the priority group. We did not have Institutional Review Board approval to include youth in the overall survey and while obtaining a random sample of this group would have been difficult, inclusion of the young may have influenced the final survey results. We did have IRB approval for the youth focus groups, however, and obtained useful qualitative data from those few participants. The statistical results reported are generalizable (with a margin of error of +/-3%) to Brooklyn's adult residents, workers and shoppers in Community District 14 for March-May 2009.

12. Please describe ways that the project resulting in the product involved collaboration that embodied principles of mutual respect, shared work and shared credit. If different, describe ways that the product itself involved collaboration that embodied principles of mutual respect, shared work and shared credit. Have all collaborators on the product been notified of and approved submission of the product to CES4Health.info? If not, why not? Please indicate whether the project resulting in the product was approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) and/or community-based review mechanism, if applicable, and provide the name(s) of the IRB/mechanism.

The Community Board 14 staff's involvement in the project included developing the youth focus of the questionnaire to reflect their own perception of priority needs, critical review and modification of the items in the questionnaire, helping to train the interviewers in civics, cultural competency and orientation to the diverse population, and the resolution of street boundary issues at the stage of data analysis. The report itself is the collaborative service-learning product of the Community Needs Assessment class. All collaborators are eager to disseminate the report. The City University of NY Institutional Review Board approved the study prior to its commencement.