The Unwillingness of the New Voter to Vote - Assignment Example

Community Profiling The following project aims at outlining the possible project or community for a detailed community profiling project. In this paper there is an attempt to clearly outline and explain the meanings of community, what are the constituents that make a community. There is also an attempt to elk out the various principles and methodologies that will be used while making a study of a case community i.e. community profiling. In order to understand and explain the meaning, methods and processes behind community profiling one has to, first and foremost understand the term ‘community’. A Community basically means an interconnection of people and their respective cultures, which are united within a specific and defined geographic area with common interests and ideals. It may also be inclusive of an amalgamation of people within the blogosphere or the virtual world, sharing the same ideological and philosophical beliefs, exchanged via an interaction through the internet. The two most essential facets, therefore, are related to both the idea of a sharing of information and an interconnection of people seeking access to this information. With regards to a community one has to understand that a community unlike many other social equations need not and does not necessarily have a leader. The binding and surviving aspects of a community are common ideal and beliefs. More interestingly, community with the evolution of technology transcends and goes beyond the tangible real world into the virtual world of the internet. Bloggers, users of social networking websites, are all members of communities. Having said all this it has to be accepted that the idea of a community is in fact a very flimsy, it is almost meaningless sociologically and can be in fact based on a large number of variables like caste, geography, religion, sex, politics, and interests among many other things. Having understood what is meant by a community it is essential to lay out an outline of what exactly it is that constitutes community profiling. A community profile is, in essence an endeavor to describe a particular community or neighborhood. It makes use of different techniques in order to build up the reality of the community from a number of perspectives and angles. There can a number of largely varied reasons for doing a community profile but is normally an attempt to prepare the grounds for a some kind of community oriented action or change. What happens is that a community profile as a precursor to any kind of subsequent action will result in a more productive and more sympathetic process of change because it will be in keeping ith the general mood and needs of the community in question. Ultimately the results will depend on the way in which in the community profile is done, who does the profiling and the methods and processes that are followed behind the profiling in question. Community profiling can take many forms. These include Individual action research, corporate action research, professional profile, focused profile, and church based profiling. The kind of method that is applied has to depend on the kind of project that is being undertaken. In each case, the community profile identifies t he current state of existence in the community, and areas that could be strengthened in order to maintain and improve its standards of life. Creating a community profile is an important first step in creating a community development plan, or ‘blueprint’ for the future of a community. A community profile is necessary to identify the future needs of a community and its potential for development. Producing a community profile provides t he essential information base required for effective local planning. The community profile that is to be undertaken in the following project is that of voting patterns in a given constituency, factors that contribute to the individual constituent of the community voting in a certain manner and how that translates into the entire community voting patterns. The third aim to figure out how many members of the community go out and cast their vote, what the motivations are behind a person casting his or her vote and if a person decides not to vote at all what is the reasoning behind that particular decision. The first thing that needs to be taken care of while making this kind of a profile is the size of the profile, whether the researcher wants the profile to be large, medium or small. Ideally for the sake of convenience without compromising on the authenticity of results the profile can be made on a medium scale which translates into the focus group being between 10 and 30 in strength. The time required for the profile is about three to four months. The profile has to answer few basic questions. The purpose of the profile which is to outline voting patterns of the new voters i.e. the age group between 18 and 25. This actually assumes great importance when one analyses the importance of a high voter tirn out in order to validate an election and give a democracy its mening. With the decline in voter turnout the world over the issue has become a matter of concern and the following community profile seeks to explain and thereby find a solution to the problem. The information that the profiling project seeks to gather is information about the ‘why’ and the ‘because’ of the phenomena. To be precise, there are four questions that the researcher has to be aware of: Key questions to be researched Research approach that is to be taken Methods to be used? time/cost for development The key questions that the Community profile seeks to answer have already been explained in the purpose behind the research. By understanding the reasons behind the unwillingness of the ‘new voter’ to vote the profile seeks to come up with a solution to the problem. As has been stated earlier there are a number of approaches that can be taken in order to complete the profiling. Ideally this kind of community profiling has to be a combination of individual action research that enables the worker to orientate himself and begin to identify what might be fruitful avenues in which to put in the requisite effort, A focused profile where there is a very clear idea of what the community profile has to be addressing This kind of profile is obviously more likely to initiate action. The profiler however has to be careful because sometimes it can miss out on wider issues and be a justification for a predetermined course. Also to be noted is that in case of a change oriented community profiling like this one there should be an active involvement of a local institution which basically means church based or temple based profiling. A local community within the neighborhood commits itself to a process of listening to what the respected say. This will generally be taken forward by an individual or a group but the community has committed to an ongoing involvement and, perhaps, subsequent action. It is linked to prayer and a process of spirituality. It has to be kept in mind that certain factors like local environment where the voters are from, the population characteristics which are inclusive of educational background and social status, labour market, i.e. the occupation of these voters at the time of the profile construction, social infrastructure i.e. the impact the society has had on the target community, Physical and economic infrastructure i.e. the sources of income and the places where the maximum of this income is being spent. The basic tools and methodology that are to be used can be: A valuable source of information can be the last census that has been conducted in the area most recently. Census information can provide the basic framework for the community profile. Knowledge and information is made available on an entire range of key statistics, e.g. age, ethnicity and employment. These are often assembled to provide a figure for other key figures. The census figures can be accessed on most government websites and therefore are a real cost and man power saver. Data in the census reports can be obtained at the national, regional and local level hence can be useful for comparisons and for drawing conclusions. In this case the census reports can be used in order to figure out the number of the new voters that have come up since the last poll, thereby streamlining the variables of research. There are a number of other officially obtained statistics that can be made use of in this profile. Most of all it is the neighborhood profiles and statistics that can be used. Information about the number of new voters that casr their votes in the last poll, even a local municipal poll can be used. In fact it has to be noted that participation in local elections is often more pronounced than it is on the national level. These factors can be examined with the help of data already compiled and made available by government and other official agencies. Maps and mapping techniques have to be utilized in the process of the profile construction. One has to necessarily draw up maps of the area that has to be brought under scan. Mapping here means putting together a list of the institutions and groups which serve the area –from council offices to community groups and are hence part of the thought formation of the target new voters. This can provide a useful starting point for the interviewing process. Random measures that can be made use of in a very effective manner are those of observation and scanning old literature on the community related to the topic. The most important method however in a project such as this would be surveys and snowball interviewing. These methods though labour intensive and time consuming are an irrevocable part of a project. This is true because one gets the perspectives straight from the target concerned. This helps to put some flesh onto the statistical bones of the research. The term snowball comes from the idea that as and when the researcher talks to one there are suggestions made about others that can be interviewed. There are other ways in which people can be spoken to as well, like going to public meetings and in this case say, a party, a get together. The final step in the profiling is making sense of the data that has been collected. Conclusions have to be drawn, comparisons have to be made, and in the end the questions that were posed at the start of the process have to be answered. Though daunting, this part of the research is really important because without completing it in a manner that is necessary all that is left is a bunch of data that is disjointed and makes no sense. The cost of developing a project like this one is not a lot because the variables that need to be examined can be kept under control. Concluding remarks in this regard would probably be incomplete without the mention of social networking websites and their immense potential of usage in this regard. A highly youth centric community profiling can make use of social networking websites in a big way because of their exposure and the limited costs that would have to be bourne using them. Profiling using the social web may support the research by granting better insights and information to base face-to-face interventions and community developing work upon. However mapping the online community is important and is in fact the tricky part because this online profiling of a physical world community is not and cannot be comprehensive. The community profile exercise can prove to be challenging due, in parts to the limitations of the data available and in parts to the complexities of the variables in question. A number of recommendations should be able to made on the basis of this profiling study. Challenges presented by this new population to the democratic set up have to be understood in a better manner by all concerned about the stable realisation of democracy in its real sense. References: Community profiling, accessed on April 14, 2009, Community profiling, accessed on April 14, 2009, http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/DSE/wcmn203.nsf/LinkView/BA6A9C6279E5081CCA25707E001C0D33A2256E79D62522CECA257091000BD060 Community Nursing Practices, Winsome St John and Helen Keller, accessed on April 14, 2009, How to write a Community profile, accessed on April 14, 2009, http://www.esds.ac.uk/themes/health/case2.asp Economic and Social service, case study 2:Creating a community profile, accessed on April 14, 2009, http://www.esds.ac.uk/themes/health/case2.asp Community Profiling, accessed on April 14, 2009, http://www.dlgrd.wa.gov.au/Publications/Docs/CommunityProfileHowTo.pdf Using Social Networking websites, accessed on April 14, 2009, http://blogs.nya.org.uk/ywsn/2008/07/using-social-network-sites-in.html 9 Conclusions, accessed on April 14, 2009, http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2007/12/18150102/9 Read More