Your assignment is to write a report that will be directed to a particular public official or professional audience to whom you will provide information about a community that you currently do not belong to. As part of finding out more about the community you've chosen, this assignment also asks you to conduct an interview with someone from that community.
It should be 5-8 double-spaced pages, and incorporate at least five primary and secondary sources.
For more information about the Community Informative Report assignment, see 165-168 in your textbook.
There are several angles at which you can approach this assignment. These are also listed in the assignment description.
1. Mini-ethnography
This angle requires you to discover how the community works, and explain this to your readers.
Some possible questions to explore include:
Who are the members? What are the values the members share? How do members interact?
2. Misconceptions
This angle asks you to explore and respond to misconceptions that your audience might have about the community.
What misconceptions might there be regarding an atheist club, a local chapter of the NRA, or a powerlifting group?
3. Issue
This approach asks you consider your community group in the context of a larger issue. For example, how might the #MeToo movement affect sexual harassment training for a local company?
For this assignment, your primary research is your interview with someone in the community you're interested in. The secondary research is the information you're being asked to find to support your primary research, i.e., information you find through library databases and other tools.
