Ellie was one of three high school students on the five-person evaluation team for the metropolitan Detroit Youth Dialogues Project. The two other researchers were students at the University of Michigan. Their assignment: to evaluate the impact of a seven-week series of interracial dialogues involving youth across metropolitan Detroit. WKCD recently interviewed Ellie about her participation. She is currently a senior at Southfield Lathrup High School. She is heading to college next fall to study public policy.
WKCD: Did you have any experience with evaluation before this project? How did you and the team get started—figuring out how you would collect your data and who would do what?
I'd never done anything like this before, being an evaluator was totally new. And the coolest part was that we got to create our own strategies for how we would get the information. Everything else I've done has always been laid out for me. Here, we got to create the whole plan ourselves, from scratch.
We decided who we wanted to interview and what questions we'd ask. We decided to have the kids do journal entries, and we wrote the prompts. We decided that we wanted them to take pictures of their communities and that would be part of the final report. We basically decided all that. And then we worked hard to get it right. We had eight different versions of what the interview questions would look like. We spent hours working through the questions, getting the words just right. With each new version, I could see how my input was directly there, "I said that!" I've never worked on anything so official, a bound book like this.
And then we all had jobs. One of my jobs was transcribing the interviews, since I type fast. I liked most transcribing the interviews I hadn't done myself. I learned from them.
WKCD: How did you approach analyzing and sorting through all the data you gathered?
When it came time to start our analysis, we combined all the transcripts with a big pile of journal entries and then sorted through and sorted through and highlighted all of the comments that stood out. We had the four main questions we wanted to answer in the report, so we looked stuff over again and again, pulling out what would go well in this section, what would work in that section. We tried to balance the quotes, like "we need to find another quote from a person of Arab-descent to fit here." We went back and forth, adjusting what went here and what went there. It was good that we had such a large amount of information, though, because it showed the diversity that was so much a part of the project. There are so many quotes, so many perspectives. Honestly, it was overwhelming.
WKCD: How did you tackle the business of presenting all of the material you collected in a final report?
Early in the project we had to do a presentation at a retreat for the dialogue groups. It forced us to focus and develop our main message, to figure out what was most relevant, what was important, what we were getting out of it and what we wanted people to get out of our final report. We created a Powerpoint where we mixed it up: we had pictures of the different communities, music, we had slides with data, quotes from the journal entries and interviews. People could see what they had said and what others had said. It was so direct. It made us feel like what we were doing was really relevant, that we were teaching others.
When it came to writing the report, we divided it up into pieces. The lessons we did as group, we debriefed as a group and everyone added their thoughts. But the writing we each did separately. And then with every draft, each one of us specialized in a particular thing. I'm the meticulous one and specialized in things like punctuation. "Hey Katie, you forgot a comma here!" I was the copy editor.
WKCD: Who did you see as the audience for your report?
The first audience for the report was the youth who were in the program. We wanted to bring back to them what was learned in the dialogues, to put it into context and help them see the bigger picture. We also wanted the report to be a tool for making the program better. And we wanted to give the community outside a sense of what went on inside. We saw the audience as both peers and adults.
The fact that our peers were going to be reading it did have an impact on the methods we choose. This is why we decided to create stories of eight of the participants. People my age, you can't just read something that's the same all the way through. The way we did it, there's quotes, there's stories, there's conclusions, and photographs. And then there is so much analysis and in depth material that reaches adults. We tried to reach both audiences at the same time. And the fact that it came from us, that the evaluation team was also diverse, with different ages and nationalities, that helped us better address the diversity of our audience.
WKCD: What struck you most about the data you collected? What would you most like to see changed in the coming summer's dialogue project?
There's one thing I definitely wish they would change for the future. Reading many of the statements students made in their journals, I realized how many of their stereotypes also had to do with socioeconomic class. With the focus on racism alone, there wasn't a chance to bring in economic class, to examine and discuss it and see how it mixes with segregation. Race and class are almost inseparable, I've learned. In future dialogues, we must focus on class too. You could tell that the youth really wanted to talk about the class issue, about the stereotypes that go with class, but the way it was set up they couldn't.
WKCD: Has the experience of being an evaluator influenced your thinking about what you'd like to study or do?
I was already interested in public policy before this, but this project opened my eyes to all that's possible in the public policy field, like evaluation. Having an outside perspective on the dialogues helped me look at the issues discussed in a whole new way, especially because I was analyzing the participants' experiences instead of directly participating. The experience also gave me a lot more respect for my teachers—how they take information and have to put it into a presentable format every day!