Locating day-labor employment: toward a geographic understanding of day-labor hiring site locations in the San Diego metropolitan area

Day-labor hiring sites are common features of the contemporary North American landscape. These are public and semi-public spaces where mostly male residents congregate daily in hopes of being hired for short-term work. Research on contemporary day-labor markets in the United States to date tends to be policy-oriented, intended to reduce the injustices that are a common part of life as a day laborer. Unfortunately, very little is understood about the spatial organization of day-labor markets. Drawing on more than five years of mixed-methods research in the San Diego Metropolitan Area (SDMA), this paper takes two important steps toward a spatial understanding of day-labor hiring sites. First, it demonstrates that informal hiring sites are established in locations that maximize laborers’ chances of finding employment. Second, it establishes a geo-spatial typology of hiring sites for the SDMA that can be used to better tailor day-labor support efforts and policy to site-level context.     

Assessing Collaborative Governance Outcomes and Indicators across Spatial and Temporal Scales: Stewardship Contract Implementation by the United States Forest Service

Abstract

Scholarship on collaboration in natural resource management is restricted by a lack of large-N assessments and mixed methods approach to examine relationships between collaborative structures and processes, and management actions and outcomes. This paper examines the relationship between perceived levels of collaboration, collaborative process indicators, and benefits of USDA Forest Service stewardship contracts at a broad spatial and temporal scale using mixed methodology. This study found higher levels of collaboration were strongly associated with jointly initiated processes that included a breadth of interests and utilized a broad range of outreach mechanisms and opportunities for engagement. Highly collaborative processes were closely linked with attaining project objectives and social and economic benefits. Findings contribute to defining collaboration by uncovering the relationship between perceived levels of collaboration, the role of process characteristics, and perceived benefits of collaborative stewardship contracting processes through a large-N dataset (n?=?1,064) and case study (n?=?61) findings.     

Exploring the Juggling of Responsibilities with Space-Time Accessibility Analysis

The ways employed parents negotiate and combine employment and caring responsibilities has recently attracted increased attention in the social sciences. Nonetheless, many studies provide only limited insight into the opportunities that specific physical, institutional, and cultural contexts offer to parents for "juggling" responsibilities. Space-time accessibility modeling might be used to fill this gap, although its conceptualizations of human subjects, space, and time need to be rethought in light of feminist geographic concerns. We propose ethnographic or narrative space-time accessibility analysis as a partial and situated way of alerting readers/spectators to the ways constraints coalesce into opportunities for juggling responsibilities. The approach is illustrated through a case study of a highly educated mother who has to reconcile fixed employment times, chauffeuring her son to childcare, and a lengthy commute via the congested highways around Utrecht in the Netherlands.     

Identifying Stakeholder Groups in Natural Resource Management: Comparing Quantitative and Qualitative Social Network Approaches

Abstract

This study compares the efficiency of two analytic approaches—qualitative and quantitative—to social network analysis for identifying stakeholder groups. Social network data were collected from 23 water and agriculture stakeholders in Arizona, USA, and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Analysis of the sample in the original order of data collection found qualitative analysis was more efficient, in that it yielded a stable result—the identification of four stakeholder groups—within 16 interviews. In contrast, the quantitative analysis did not produce a stable result after 23 interviews. Repeated analyses with randomized order and reverse order samples found qualitative approaches yielded more stable results, took about the same number of interviews to yield results, and produced slightly fewer stakeholder groups compared to quantitative approaches. Our findings suggest that, in resource-constrained projects, qualitative social network analysis for identifying stakeholder groups can provide an efficient alternative to conventional quantitative social network analysis.     

A Review of “Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach”

Books Reviewed:

Browning, Frank A Queer Geography: Journeys Toward a Sexual Self

Fellows, Will Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest

Rubenstein, James M. The Cultural Landscape: An Introduction to Human Geography. 6th ed

Knox, Paul L. and Marston, Sallie A. Human Geography: Places and Regions in Global Context

Kuby, Michael; Harner, John, and Gover, Patricia Human Geography in Action     

Trial by Fire: natural hazards,mixed-methods and cultural research

This paper considers the issues of research ‘relevance’ and ‘use’ to reflect upon a cultural geography research project on bushfire that did not begin with any specific aim of being useful to policy makers but which has garnered considerable and ongoing interest from a broad audience. It provides an example of how the integration of quantitative and qualitative research methods and data can enhance research into cultural aspects of natural hazards whilst simultaneously playing a key role in ensuring that the research results are of interest to a wide range of groups. Using a mixed-methods research approach was found to provide insight into complex factors that influence attitudes and actions towards bushfire amongst diverse landholders in rural–urban interface areas in south-east Australia. We argue that mixed-methods research is a powerful tool in building and enhancing a cultural geography that has policy relevance, retains analytical depth, and is acceptable to risk managers. The ability of cultural geography through mixed-methods research to illuminate how socio-cultural processes are central to environmental attitudes and preparedness behaviour has direct relevance to recent international discussions of how to manage the vulnerability of the growing number of people living in bushfire-prone rural–urban interface areas.     

Simultaneous Analysis of Qualitative and Quantitative Social Science Data in Conservation

Conservation research includes social as well as natural sciences, and social sciences include qualitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. Most mixed-methods research adopts quantitative and qualitative approaches in parallel or in sequence, using related but distinct sets of data. Transformations of raw data, to apply qualitative and quantitative approaches to the same dataset, are uncommon, and beset by obstacles. I argue that dual analysis of a single dataset can be valuable and sound, subject to four caveats. Authors must: check for adequate sampling as well as theoretical saturation; distinguish clearly between structural and statistical associations; explicitly describe conversion from qualitative constructs and codes, to quantitative categories or other variables; and ensure that precision, reliability and generalizability are considered appropriately within both analyses.