My group decided that we wanted to go to Washington Square park to ask people questions about their views on poverty. We wanted to see if people knew how big of a problem poverty is in NYC. We asked multiple questions such as peoples thoughts when they hear the word poverty, what they think the main cause of poverty is, and how they think people can help. We also had them guess how many people and children live in poverty in NYC and then revealed to them the actual numbers. We wanted to see how people reacted to this and if they would under or over estimate. When we first arrived at the park, our group interviewed a couple people together, and then split up into pairs and each interviewed a few more. I thought that all of our interviews were extremely interesting and insightful and gave us a lot of information on people’s real thoughts on poverty. Our next steps will be to create a video that brings together all of the different interviews and their most interesting points. We hope to share this at our workshop to show students how important it is to raise awareness about issues like these and how anyone can help. The people we interviewed talked a lot about the government and funding, so this is something I think we should research and learn more about. Overall, I think this fieldwork was really helpful and will definitely help us with our workshop.
