Jesse Cowley - Research Methods/English 6401

My biggest need right now might be to nail down how to select participants. I'm planning on using purposeful sampling, but I still need to define the criteria that I'll be using to decipher which participants truly fit into the study. I've found some farmers' market organizations with lists that will certainly be helpful, but I'm also trying to consider other ways of locating participants. It seems that if I only draw my sample from online sources, I'm likely to find a bias toward using online tools--given the fact that most of that sample would probably be using them already. I would like to find as diverse a population as possible, in terms of current farm-related online-tool use.

Most of the studies I have found used relatively small sample sizes. They generally focused on one particular area. Given the fact that local food producers deal with very different circumstances depending on their location in the world, I think this leaves a need replication in different areas. I haven't found a pertinent study from Utah or anywhere in the Western United States, for that matter. So possible general questions could be: what online features do local food producers in Utah want? What do they not care for?How do their answers differ from those of local food consumers? There's also potential in using the framework of online customer engagement from the literature review to analyze currently existing local food/farmer websites.

It's a slight change from what I mentioned in the first post, but I've decided that my topic will be to analyze what and how elements of online presence (or lack thereof) affect small, local food producers. Something like that. Here's my tentative 10 sources: Abrams, K. M., & Sackmann, A. (2014).  Are alternative farmers yielding success with online marketing and communication tools for their social capital and business viability?.  Journal of Applied Communications , 98 (3),48-62. Retrieved from  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262830366_Are_Alternative_Farmers_Yielding_Success_with_Online_Marketing_and_Communication_Tools_for_Their_Social_Capital_and_Business_Viability Radcliffe, J., Skinner, K., Spring, A., Picard, L., Benoit, F., & Dodd, W . (2021).  Virtual barriers: Unpacking the sustainability implications of online food spaces and the Yellowknife Farmers Market’s response to COVID-19 .  Nutrition Journal ,  20 (12). Retrieved from...

My ultimate dream in life is to own and operate a small farmstead. Because of this, I end up spending a fair amount of my free time watching youtube videos of people "living the dream" on their small acreages. It has become a genuine way to learn and practice new skills/competencies. So something along the lines of analyzing how youtube is used as an education tool might be an interesting research project for me. A second, very unrelated, topic I thought might be fun would be to study the usability (or watchability, I guess) of scoreboards and graphics during televised football games. I could ask questions like: What makes them effective among those who like the game already? Are there ways to change them to help light a fire of fandom in the less-than-interested?