Research Methods for Community Change: A Project-Based Approach

Randy Stoecker is a Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, with a joint appointment at the University of Wisconsin Extension Center for Community and Economic Development. He is the moderator/editor of COMM-ORG: The On-Line Conference on Community Organizing and Development (http://comm-org.wisc.edu). His areas of expertise include community organizing and development, participatory action research/evaluation, and community information technology. He has been involved in a wide variety of community-based participatory research projects and participatory evaluations with community development corporations, community organizing groups, and community information technology programs across North America and Australia. He also helped build and evaluate university-community collaborations through the Corella and Bertram F. Bonner Foundation’s Learn and Serve America Community Research Project. Randy trains, speaks and writes extensively on community organizing and development, community-based participatory research, service learning, and community information technology. He is author of Defending Community (1994) co-author of Community-Based Research and Higher Education (2003), and co-editor of The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning (2009). You can find his complete curriculum vitae at http://comm-org.wisc.edu/stoeckerfolio/stoeckvita.htm. He resides in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife and 50-pound standard poodle (his daughter is now away at college), and wishes he lived in a society where research has become such an integral part of the culture that people are no longer fooled into making self-destructive political choices.