Doing Research At The Community Level

Research at the community level varies with a goal of interacting with them at a person level which can result in a large amount of information only they can provide. One method of doing research at the community level is what Kevin Matteson did in New York which is to look at what the local community is doing and see what the results are. The benefits is that a person can build a relation with the community and they may be able to help the community implement methods that will make their goals easier to achieve. A weakness is trying to get that access because they have to make sure the person doing the research will not exploit them. In Dunn he talks about bringing nature to the communities that do not have access to nature. So a way to getting communities involved in conservation research is to have them implement projects that shows them how they are connected to nature like implementing bird

The strengths of this particular methods is that it can give a person who is not familiar with the area knowledge that some of the people who lived in that community their entire life are not aware of. The weakness is that they may include things that require local knowledge to understand what they are talking about, for example Gary Martin talked about how words that a researcher and the local community use may be the same but have different meanings. So the researcher will have to make sure they understand what they mean even if they think they know what the local community said, and the researcher must also be aware of any differences between Western taxa and