The sustainable nonprofit: The world is not black and white

Pro vs. con, or can you find a home in the middle of a social issue?

When you perform qualitative interviews with the general public, you realize two things very quickly: The world is not black and white, and people for the most part are torn on where they stand.

As researchers, we must try to understand the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of the public or a target audience as defined by the clients, organizations, and movements we work for. In that work, we find ourselves using qualitative and ethnographic methods to dig deeper into the sometimes surface-level quantitative data we receive.

In the past year alone, I’ve participated in at least twenty-five research projects in which we were tasked with understanding the mindset of the American public as it relates to a specific social issue. We found ourselves engaging with rural, urban, and suburban individuals who often strike an interesting balance on issues — between what they grew up with, learned, or even experienced in their earlier lives, and the complexity of today’s issues in a world where technology, connection, and relationships are being created and built at varying levels.

This means that many individuals are neither “pro” nor “anti” about most things. They often reflect a spectrum of support as they work through their personal decisions about whether to support, oppose, or even take no stance on an issue....

Read the full column article by Derrick Feldmann, lead researcher at Cause and Social Influence.

(Photo credit: GettyImages/FG Trade)