INNOVATIONS
QUALITATIVE INNOVATIONS
Dr. Kimberly Wiley develops innovative tools for examining large qualitative datasets in team-based settings.
VIDEO ANALYSIS
Single Data Source
Her research lab applies textual analysis to make sense of videos in the context of nonprofit management theory. An analysis of 1200 TikToks indicated that nonprofits use TikTok far differently than other social media platforms: they seek community rather than inform and advocate in this space. By analyzing 150 television episodes on volunteering, the team learned that societal views of volunteering portrayed on television don’t align with reality.
In these two projects, the team applied a technique where observed behaviors and interactions mattered as much or more than spoken or written words. Table 2 from “The paradox of compulsory volunteering: A textual analysis of charity as punishment on U.S. television” demonstrates the coding process.
Comparative Sources
The Nonprofit & Advocacy Lab is partnering with Seth Meyer, Bridgewater State University, and Brad Johson, University of Nevada Reno, to examine how influencers compare to government and nonprofits when it comes to public health messaging. For instance, consider the difference between this influencer and a state health department. @Domenic shares his vaccine experience on TikTok to encourages his followers to…well…follow him through the vaccine line. Mashachuttes Public Health Department takes a different approach by focusing on facts and information via Twitter. The cross-country, 10-person team meets weekly to co-code Twitter, TikTok, FB, Insta, and YouTube messaging on mpox from six U.S. metro areas. The team is coding for heternormativity, social media post function, and social media savviness.
DOCUMENT ANALYSIS
Longitudinal Data
Teamwork enhances the translation of documents into qualitative data. Dr. Wiley works with teams of research assistants to code documentation of social movements, advocacy coalitions, and nonprofit ecologies. The team’s coding of 1900 texts from the battered women’s movement captured how this movement formalized into a coalition and organizations. The project’s findings demonstrated that when coalition advocates may be more valuable than how they advocate. This domestic violence advocacy coalition focused its efforts on effective policy implementation rather than successful policy change, as demonstrated in this figure. The coalition’s internal communications revealed their motives alongside their actions.
Point-In-Time Data
A five-person team qualitatively analyzed 1300 IRS Forms 990 to build an ecology of food and agriculture nonprofits based on the food supply chain. Food distribution nonprofits, like food banks and soup kitchens, often come to mind when thinking about this subsector. But the team found that over 50% of Florida’s food and agriculture nonprofits support pre-production, not distribution or consumption.
Florida’s pre-production nonprofits ensure agri-businesses, large and small, have the resources they need, like research, favorable public policy, and professional development to maintain financial and human resource stability. Typically, IRS Forms 990 are used to analyze finances. The Nonprofit & Advocacy lab worked in teams to extract qualitative data from these forms to build a rich dataset and a nonprofit directory for UF/IFAS Extension.
Pairing Software
Most recently, the Nonprofit & Advocacy Lab assembled 150 news articles documenting how the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has evolved from a simple bipartisan issue to a partisan battleground. Team members are using Zotero for data collection and management and then NVivo to analyze each article line-by-line. The 2-stage coding process will allow the team to capture advocacy coalition evolution for each VAWA reauthorization and how each coalition leveraged political resources toward policy wins. The news articles capture pro-VAWA efforts and the opposition, as is demonstrated in these headlines.
