Well, we did our data collection, and the results came in to answer our question of whether the kindness of strangers would stop a theft. As expected, there was a lot of variations to our answers. For the most part, we found that humanity was good and would step in, but we still had our lingering doubts, especially those who set up sting operations and had their wallets/phones/calculators nabbed. I'm glad to see that there were so many different methods of research done in the class as we could see the up and downsides of all of them.
I had mentioned to you the story of an Indian grad student at the University of Chicago, Sudhir Venkatesh, who wanted to study the workings of a typical African American Chicago street gang in the early 90s. He entered the housing projects and began surveying gang members by asking them how it felt to be black and poor, with a spectrum of potential answers from very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, to very good. As you can imagine, he didn't get too many answers, and he was actually held hostage by the gang overnight because they didn't know what he was up to. The result of this hostage experience was that he was befriended by the leader of the street gang and given an up close and personal look at the gang, getting much more rich detail. If you'd like to read an excerpt from the resulting book, Gang Leader For a Day, click HERE. If you'd like to see the movie, wait until next year when it comes to a theater near you :) If you want hear from Venkatesh, see below. Compare his research methods to your own. Do you think you got the best results that you could have, or were there barriers in the way from getting the true answers? Humans aren't too easy to study, are they? :)
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