Community Analysis

This assignment requires you to analyze, which means to break something down into parts so that you can understand how the components work together as a whole. First, you need to choose a community to analyze. Because analysis means that you want to understand your topic as fully as possible, you may choose a more focused discourse community. Ideally, you will choose a community that interests you, or perhaps one in which you are a member.

Let’s look for example at the website of the Generations United (GU) www.gu.org throughout this guideline. The website provides comprehensive information about the organization and encourages visitors to get involved. The organization has posted their testimonials and information about their accomplishments. Testimonials and reports, as well as other materials on the website are presented in the form of texts, pictures, videos, charts, and other formats. The organization also uses various media formats, such as infographics, videos, and transcripts at raising awareness on generational issues.

You may start with some description about the community. Define the mission, goals, and objectives of the community. For example, the vision of GU is a “A world that values and engages all generations” and the mission is to improve the lives of children, youth, and older people through intergenerational collaboration, public policies, and programs for the enduring benefit of all. www.gu.org/who-we-are/

Next, you need to provide some background information about the organization. Some questions you might seek to answer include:
Who are the members / partners of this community? How long has the organization been in this business?
https://www.gu.org/who-we-are/partners/
How does the community create and share knowledge? how do they share information relevant to their work? What kind of materials do they produce? Who are their audiences?
Ex. lesson plans, handouts, videos, presentations, articles, interviews, and so on, and so forth. These documents helps us understand how people in the community do their business and share information and knowledge. Looking at GU documents and resources www.gu.org/resources/ , what audiences are their communications geared at? The audience and purpose determine where and how the message will be communicated.
What genres and text forms does the community regularly use?
See GU annual report www.gu.org/app/uploads/2020/05/AnnualReport-2018.pdf
How does the community reflect various assumptions, values, and beliefs of the group or culture at large?
See the following site for GU core values www.gu.org/who-we-are/mission/

What are some of the documents the community uses in order to make decisions?
These may include government documents or publications by professionals that allow you to see how the members of your community are portrayed and how their communication practices come through. For example, the strategic plan posted on this website was created while I was serving as Assistant Deputy Director and then Deputy Director of Public Health Department at County of San Diego during 2013-2018. www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/dam/sdc/hhsa/programs/phs/documents/PHSStrategicPlan2013-2018.pdf

Analysis is more than simply reporting information or summarizing your information about the community/ organization (not just on describing the group in general). The first part of your textbook has provided you with knowledge about the multiple dimensions of persons, and the assignments focused on you as a person and helping you understand your preferences in terms of interaction with environment. Knowledge about the self, values, and ethics are ingredients of knowing what community to choose for this assignment and you want to emphasis when you are practicing social work in your career. Analyzing your information means drawing an original conclusion about some aspect of your chosen community. Analyzing means asking what is interesting about how your community functions? What surprises you about the community? Did you find something confusing/conflicting or troubling about the community’s practices?

The second part of your textbook has provided you with knowledge about the multiple dimensions of environments and the role that environment plays in human behavior. Some questions you might seek to answer in your analysis may include:
How does the community construct culture and beliefs about what is important/ unimportant, desirable/undesirable, right/ wrong (Chapter 8) and how these values are aligned/ unaligned with your personal values?
Chapter 9 recognizes national and global trends in eight major social institutions (government and political, economic, education, health care, social welfare, religious, mass media, and family and kinship). Which social institution your community falls under and how does the community provide order and stability to society and order to individual lives?
Chapter 12 explores the differences between formal organizations in terms of size, structure, culture, goals, functions, etc. Has the community in your study meet environmental demands and has adapted to environmental change (social, political, cultural, technological, etc.)? has the relationships changed over time?
Chapter 13 provides you with a definition of community in the social work context and explores long-standing disagreements about social work’s relationship to community centers on four points of tension: community as context for practice versus target of practice, agency orientation versus social action, conflict model versus collaborative model, and expert versus partner in the social change