The Research Design

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe our overall research design and key methodological considerations. First, we discuss how classic community studies and subsequent works on social and contextual influence inspire our work. In thinking about how social spaces matter, we describe how we conceptualize neighborhoods, and how we operationalize distance to mirror people’s everyday experience of their residential space. Second, we introduce the three observational research sites: a sample of voting precincts from Franklin County, Ohio, and the cities of Upper Arlington, Ohio, and Broomfield, Colorado. Third, we describe the observational studies carried out between 2008 and 2014 across these sites and introduce key concepts from spatial analysis that maximize the usefulness of these data. Fourth, we describe the surveys fielded in these sites following the 2008 and 2012 elections and describe the techniques used to elicit information about individual survey respondents and their communities.