Page 226 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

Prior to identifying that the Albany New York Community Conversation could word as the

source for my data gathering, contact and outreach was made with organizers of various similar

efforts around the state to inform them of my research and solicit permission to attend the

respective gatherings for the purpose of making informal observation with the hope of canvassing

participant volunteers for data gathering. My intent was to gather data from public dialogues and

civic events that I could attend and informally observe participant interactions during the dialogue

process. Doing so would allow myself exposure to a broader audience of perspective participants

for interviews and contributed to data acquisition in a succinct amount of time.

Before the Albany CC, initial experimental participants were either students in my ITT

Communications course or Group Theory class, while other volunteers or facilitators I selected

had attended Community Conversations I convened in the past and others contacted had partaken

with me in dialogues on a variety of subjects that were convened prior to my dissertation proposal’s

approval by the Western Institute for Social Research in Berkeley (WISR.edu) to begin.

To ensure the info and follow-up interviews was fresh, I set a limit of 10 days between the

actual CC event and the date of the data gathering to assure that participants retained a high degree

of recall about their dialogue experiences and resulting reflections pertaining to their attending the

Community Conversation, participant interactions among group members, and lessons learned.

One goal of the data gathering process was to include a broadly diverse group of

participants, to the extent allowed through participant self-selection. Initially, any individual

participating in the Albany CC dialogue on Implicit Bias had an opportunity to contribute data

through the survey interview process. Tracking the demographics of participants completing the

interviews, combined with the technique of snowballing aided in reaching a more diverse pool of

interviewees, which of course was limited to the universe of individuals who attended one or more

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