While doing research for my Grant Writing group project, I found a survey by Lu and Carter of MTU’s Social Sciences department that found having food stamps did not help reduce food insecurity in the Western Upper Peninsula. I originally approached a couple of professors and my advisor about interviews to expand upon this survey as an Independent Study, but we realized that this may qualify as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) project. I wrote this proposal for the SURF application in about 24 hours, which was significantly sped up by already having a lot of relevant data from Grant Writing and personal research interests.
My SURF Proposal was accepted, and my professors and I began meeting to develop robust research questions, informed consent forms, and an interview guide. We had very detailed discussions about incentives, particularly since I understood that even $20 would’ve been enough for me to agree to many things I’d be uncomfortable with when I was well below the poverty line. We settled on offering $20 Visa gift cards to participants as appreciation for their time, but not making any mention of this incentive until someone already expressed interest in participating. The end of the semester and some of the summer was spent pursuing IRB approval for our research. While awaiting approval, we identified a list of locations to place recruitment posters.
We played around a fair bit with the functionality of the flyers. We used large, bright red text for the title and sign-up to help catch the attention of people we expect to be busy and probably preoccupied. Additionally, we ended up adding tabs with contact info to the bottom in case people would be interested but were too busy to fill out the survey and send a text in the moment. Without a tool to perforate the paper, I mimicked the effect by repeatedly folding the paper and very lightly scoring it with a dull boxcutter.
We got permission to place these fliers on grocery store and gas station message boards, on liquor and tobacco store counters, and at food pantries.
Recruitment has posed a slightly larger challenge than we originally anticipated. The study by Lu and Carter, that we seek to expand on, found that only about 8% of Western UP residents used SNAP—which means best case scenario we are looking at 3,000 eligible recruits before considering time commitments, willingness to participate, and even catching their attention. I am working on launching a more grassroots Facebook advertising/recruitment campaign since most local businesses use Facebook to communicate events.
While we wait to see the effect of the Facebook recruitment campaign, one of my research professors and I have begun expanding upon our discourse analysis. As part of the background research, we were going to compare the coverage of the “Big, Beautiful Bill” in the Daily Mining Gazette (the local paper) to Reuters. This discourse analysis would provide us an idea of what local people had been told about the Bill and how it is supposed to impact funding for things like SNAP and Medicaid. We have since chosen to add in the same comparison for the government shutdown, and to also compare the discourse across time (from bill to shutdown) for each newspaper.
Brendan Moore 