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Research methods

Our primary research question was: how do, can and should communities create more sustainable, equitable and food secure communities? Our secondary one was: what are means for creating more equitable community-university collaborations in research, action and education?

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We learned about both by doing. For the first question, we relied upon the collective decades of expertise and experience the five community-based organizations (CBOs) brought to the table. Also, we traced the work of the CBOs and how each invested its sub-award from Food Dignity over the five years of our collaboration (Woodsum 2018; Porter 2018). For the second, we learned via striving for such relations in our own collaborations.

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We primarily used multiple case study research methods to document and learn from actions (Porter 2018), including developing a collaborative version of pathway modelling (Hargraves & Denning 2018). The work of the CBOs was our primary unit of analysis in the first question. Our collaboration itself was the focal point for analysis in the second question.

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In addition, we examined the minigrant programs each CBO developed (Hargraves 2018) and conducted some quantitative agroecological research (see, e.g., Conk & Porter 2016; Gregory, Leslie & Drinkwater 2016).  

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Resources

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