The purpose of this project was to interact with community members in East Africa to discern problems facing the community and how the Global Livingston Institute and other organizations can be of assistance. In order to meet the needs of a community, it is crucial to determine what those needs look like.
Overview
The primary goal of this research study was to listen to and document the needs and desires of community members in Entusi. This project aimed to gain insight into this particular community and create collaborative networks. The central research guiding this particular research project was this: What are the specific needs of the members of the Lake Bunyonyi region and how can we collaborate to sustainably address those needs. A research advisory committee assisted in formulating research questions aimed at this central research question in order to focus the scope of the research study.
The rationale for conducting this study was shaped by several important theories.
Appreciative inquiry
An approach that seeks to locate and highlight the life-giving forces of the individual, group or society’s existence at its most positive source (Whitney, 2011). As people become actively aware of their strengths, talents, and passions they are then able to act more effectively and deliberately towards desired objectives or realities.
Phenomenology
The method of phenomenology involves a way of contextualizing and conceptualizing the lived experiences of others as lived by them. The central idea is that understanding a person’s experience often begins with the individual’s own interpretation of events. A description of a particular experience is given and descriptively analyzed by a researcher for themes and underlying phenomena. Edmund Husserl is typically considered the father of phenomenology and argued that in order to thoroughly study a person’s experience, one has to examine how this experience appears in the person’s consciousness (Throop, 2012).
Social Constructivism
Social constructivism is another theory that shaped the theoretical paradigm of this research project. At the heart of this theory is the idea that individuals are active constructors of their social world. Society is therefore then seen as both a subjective reality and as an objective reality. Meaning is discerned from the environment and is then shared (Kim, 2001). Denzin & Lincoln note the importance of subjective realities versus objective realities.
They state, “Constructivists are deeply committed to the contrary view that what we take to be objective knowledge and truth is the result of perspective. Knowledge and truth are created, not discovered by the mind.” (Denzin & Lincoln, 1998). This theory is related to this particular study in that an individual’s beliefs about the status of their community are largely shaped by how images of success and failure are constructed in their particular culture. This particular theory is also very connected to grounded theory, an inductive methodology (Kim, 2001). This methodology first starts with a research question or the gathering of data from which a theory is then systematically created. This theory was used to shape the research paradigm of this project because I believe that cultural perspectives shape individual truths. In order to understand individuals you must first examine how they understand the world around them which is a major tenant of social constructivism.
