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Academic Conversation and Inquiry Process
As I've mentioned in my previous blog post and introduction to my project, I am hoping to find how the location of an animal shelter (relatively urban v relatively rural areas) impact the types of dogs being adopted from shelters. There have already been several studies done on how characteristics of dogs impact their adoptability/length of stay in shelters, but so far I have found none analyzing the difference between the characteristics of dogs adopted from more rural or more urban areas. I decided to look into this gap because another study, Detailed Assessment of Pet Ownership Rates in Four Underserved Urban and Rural Communities in the United States, found that pet ownership rates varied widely between urban and rural areas, and I hypothesized that a varying rate of pet, and more specifically dog, ownership could impact adoption patterns.
Firstly, I will be determining whether a shelter is in an urban or rural areas based off of the population density data from the US Census Bureau of the city that each shelter is located in.
Additionally, I will be using the board categories of dog characteristics that were used in the study Factors Influencing Time to Adoption for Dogs in a Provincial Shelter System in Canada. These include sex ( male or female ), coat color ( black, brown, gray, white, yellow, mixed, patterned ), age ( <1 year old, 1-10 year old, >10 years old), and breed (bully, companion, giant, guard, herding, hound, lap, spitz, sporting, and terrier).
I tried to contact each shelter about providing data over the course of a year (2022-2023 to avoid COVID bias), but since only one shelter was able to provide the data that I needed, I opted to check in on the shelter websites every two days and check the inventory of dogs available for adoption. Since the websites contained all of the information about the dogs that I needed for my data analysis, I simply recorded all the dogs in the shelters and marked down what days I saw them appear on the website. When the dogs no longer showed up on the website, I assumed they had been adopted.
Aileigh Kay (2018)
My data collection period began the first full week of December, and I plan on concluding data collection at the end of February. My data collection has been continuous, with the exception of one-week in late December when I experienced an internet outage and was unable to access the shelter websites for data collection.
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