Projects

MIIS Projects

Qualitative Curriculum

April 18, 2020
Salome Pachkoria and Layisha Paerhati developed curriculum for Qualitative Data Analysis, available to all levels for the MIIS community. The curriculum provides a detailed explanation of the key features of qualitative analysis and analytical tools that are easy to learn and practice. This curriculum can be leveraged to learn about qualitative data cleaning, data visualization, data management, and coding for analyzing interviews using tools such as Dedoose, Excel, Canva, and Tableau.

Online Data Bootcamp – Learning Modules: Accessible to the MIIS community. If this is your first time, click “Join This Course” in the upper-right corner of your browser, then click “Enroll in this Course” on the resulting page.

Community Projects

Harmony at Home

The mission of Harmony at Home is to end the cycles of violence and abuse by empowering children and young adults with knowledge, skills and confidence to lead healthy and productive lives. Harmony at Home’s role is to provide programs, oversight, and management of the programs they provide. Their goal is to ensure the programs’ long-term sustainability while maintaining quality control and continuity of services. The META Lab collaborated with Harmony at Home to assist in capturing the full potential of its data by designing a system, using  recent, existing data, which will increase accessibility to information and streamline data collection and analysis processes. With the support of the META Lab, Harmony at Home was able to create a database that would codify relevant information into a digital format, set up a database-management system for future use and analyse existing data to determine the current demographic reach of Harmony At Home. Click here to learn more about this collaboration.

Harmony At Home

Night Walks

Night Walks is a community violence prevention program in the city of Salinas that has been taking place on the weekly basis since 2009. In conjunction with Salinas’ faith-based organizations, the City of Salinas Community Safety Division organizes and sponsors these “night walks” to increase the presence in the streets during the most dangerous hours of gang violence. The META Lab has supported Night Walks, through its partnership with CASP, to determine “hot spots” of violence using aggregate police data and mapping software. Currently, we are working with mapping to isolate the ebbs and flows of gang violence in the city. The META Lab is also engages in an ongoing effort to evaluate the impact of Night Walks. Social Network Analysis of CASP: The Community Alliance for Safety and Peace or CASP is a network of organizations based out of Salinas dedicated to the prevention and mitigation of youth violence. In 2014, The META Lab was asked to conduct a network analysis of Salinas’ Community Alliance for Safety and Peace (CASP). The goal was to evaluate and provide new perspectives about how this coalition of over 100 organizations works together to implement P.I.E.R. (Prevention, Intervention, Enforcement, Re-entry) approach to reducing youth violence. META Lab director Dr. Murphy, in conjunction with the Introduction to Social Networking class on the MIIS campus conducted a survey of  CASP’s 60+ member organizations, businesses and agencies as well as 40+ ancillary or affiliated organizations to gather the data necessary to analyze the various networks existing within CASP. The META Lab researchers in the Spring of 2015 utilized these survey results to analyze the CASP network and generated 3 identity-related networks; a leadership network, collaboration network and information network, that will play a central role in future CASP decision-making processes. Click here to learn more about this project.

SalinasHotspot

Social Network Analysis of CASP

The Community Alliance for Safety and Peace (CASP) is a network of organizations based out of Salinas dedicated to the prevention and mitigation of youth violence. In 2014, The META Lab was asked to conduct a network analysis of Salinas’ Community Alliance for Safety and Peace (CASP). The goal was to evaluate and provide new perspectives about how this coalition of over 100 organizations works together to implement P.I.E.R. (Prevention, Intervention, Enforcement, Re-entry) approach to reducing youth violence. META Lab director Dr. Murphy, in conjunction with the Introduction to Social Networking class on the MIIS campus conducted a survey of  CASP’s 60+ member organizations, businesses and agencies as well as 40+ ancillary or affiliated organizations to gather the data necessary to analyze the various networks existing within CASP. The META Lab researchers in the Spring of 2015 utilized these survey results to analyze the CASP network and generated 3 identity-related networks; a leadership network, collaboration network and information network, that will play a central role in future CASP decision-making processes. Click here to learn more about this project.

casp1

City of Salinas Police-Community Relations Evaluation

The META Lab was contracted by the City of Salinas to evaluate the programs under its 2-year grant to improve police-community relations. 5 students participated in data collection during J-term, and are now analyzing the quantitative and qualitative data for their Advanced Policy Analysis course. As of April 2017, we have collected 697 online surveys about police and community member perspectives and 247 pre- and post-program paper surveys. We have also held 20 individual interviews and one focus group.  The META Lab will continue its involvement in this project until its completion in August 2018. For more information, visit our website, Say Salinas.

One Village Partners

Throughout 2016, three META Lab Research Assistants served as consultants for One Village Partners (OVP), whose mission is to “engage villagers in Sierra Leone to meet their needs and skills for self-reliance”. OVP uses a variety of paper data collection to track individual participant and overall project success. Previously, this data needed to be entered into an Excel spreadsheet by hand, causing significant human error. The META Lab designed and coded 15 Excel VBA Userforms based on the original paper forms. These forms only allow staff to enter data in specific formats, and automatically populate a spreadsheet with that data. The contract with OVP also includes technical support hours for ongoing assistance. This successful project can serve as a model for future NGO consulting opportunities.

Screenshot.CommunityAssets

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