The Public Policy Task Force at SMU’s School of Social Sciences is a semester-long course that offers an opportunity for students to get involved with real world issues under the guidance of an outside party that is professionally engaged in the relevant field. Rather than pose well-defined problems for the students to solve, the task force is structured to introduce students to the complexity of social and policy challenges. By scoping, implementing, and analyzing research in project teams, students further their policy-relevant learning by exploring their topic in depth and shaping it through all stages of the research process. When done well, the findings of these student research teams can shed new light on challenging problems, and also inspire a lifelong commitment to a social and civic engagement.
The topic of this task force is “Building community from the ground up.” Our focus will be on ground up initiatives (i.e. small scale self-organized groups) in Singapore and we will examine their experiences through their lifecycle, with attention to the circumstances under which they grow into registered societies, remain informal, or exit the space. Why do they do what they do? What do they learn or gain from the experience? These questions will be addressed through ethnographic fieldwork (direct observation, formal and informal interviews), and students will trained in ethnographic methods through this course.
For this iteration of the Public Policy Task Force we will partner with the Partnerships Office of the Ministry of Culture Community, and Youth. Students will benefit from the guidance of civil servants from the Partnerships Office during the semester, and will present their findings to them at a closeddoor event to be held at the end of the term. The external partners may be expanded to include private or people sector organizations. There is a lot of flexibility in shaping the focus of the project teams to match the interests of students and partners. Students with an interest in working on social issues both in and outside of government can gain practical insights from this experience. This is an intensive course, but one which rewards students for the effort they put into it.
The members of the task force will be organized into different subteams which will take responsibility for different aspects of our work. Everyone will take on the role of ethnographer. This entails going to our field sites, producing field notes, and coding them. Additionally, two students will be the editors of the final report (although everyone contributes to it), two students will be in charge of presenting our key findings, and two to three students will take the lead in ensuring the consistency of coding across the project. We will change the coding team half-way through the term so that different students get a chance to take on this challenge.
Class time will usually be spent on qualitative data analysis. The nature of this research methodology is iterative and requires a constant back and forth between the field work itself and analyzing it. There is very little assigned reading for this class. You are expected to conduct field visits every week and to complete the write-up of your field notes within 24 hours. Field research will take place outside of the class meeting time.
Students will be trained in the tools and techniques of fieldwork, participatory research, and qualitative data analysis. Our approach will be an iterative one in which we will regularly refine our codes and analytical themes based on the emergent patterns in the field notes. We will use a software platform (www.dedoose.com) that will enable us to approach the analytical challenge together as a team. The tasks of analysing field notes and then coding them in preparation for writing analytic memos will take up the major portion of our in-class time. This research training will be excellent preparation for anyone taking on an independent study or thesis which involves primary research. Participants in the task force will be required to undertake regular visits to for interviews and field visits around Singapore. However, research methodologies will have to be adapted to suit the circumstances of the pandemic, and this may include an online qualitative research process.