Mohsen's Journal

Friday, Apr 1, 2022, Lawrence

Sophia and I met today in the office as we do every Friday. She came to the meeting with good news. We have our first two interviews scheduled for next week on Monday and Friday. So, besides going through educational materials, we rehearsed the interview guide and revised it based on our new study population (community leaders instead of community members). Also, we discussed note-taking, recording interviews, writing reflections after interviews, and transcribing them. It feels very good to finally have scheduled interviews.

Monday, Mar 28, 2022, Lawrence

Any project needs a certain amount of passion to move forward.

Wednesday, Mar 23, 2022, Lawrence

Since we are having a hard time identifying people to interview, I'm wondering it might be helpful to make a shift in our target audience from low-income households to neighborhood leaders and organization leaders who assist such households with their energy needs and program applications.

Tuesday, Mar 22, 2022, Lawrence

Sophia and I met today. Here are what we talked about:

• Keeping track of timesheet.

• Doing one more round of fliers

• following up with all contacts to schedule an interview this weekend.

• Reviewing and revising the interview guide.

• Completing the website by our next meeting on Friday:

  • Journals => separate from reflections on educational or interview materials. Journals reflect on our experience with the entire project.

• Preparing video presentation on:

  • The first impression that the project had on you when you saw the ad

  • Your expectations before starting the project

  • What is the importance and goal of the project

  • What we have covered so far (educational + interview)

  • The troubles we've faced so far

    • in terms of technical aspects of the project

    • in terms of working as a team

  • How did we manage to overcome the difficulties? If we did not, how do you imagine we should manage them?

  • Strength and weaknesses of the project (any imaginable aspects) so far.

  • What is your expectation of the rest of the project?

    • What do you expect the project to accomplish in the second half?

    • What do you expect yourself to accomplish or learn in the second half?

Monday, Mar 21, 2022, Lawrence

It's been a couple of weeks that Sophia and I have not met due to Spring break. I do not like the fact that we are officially lagging behind with respect to interviews.

Sunday, Mar 13, 2022, Lawrence

Some important notes from Ty regarding interviews:

• Leaders in communities understandably want to fully vet and curate access to folks they've worked with in the past due to the long history of transactional collegiate research of struggling communities (taking their valuable time and forcing them to break down trauma without meaningful results or follow up).

• Recorded full interviews in an academic survey process may be a tall order for most folks in the energy justice space.

• A lot of this work may need to be done through trusted community members instead of directly.

Saturday, Mar 12, 2022, Lawrence

We are in the week of Spring break at KU and the project is kind of on a halt.

Friday, Feb 25, 2022, Lawrence

Sophia and I met at 2:00 pm in the PhD students' office at Wesco today. Here are what we talked about:

• The website will be updated covering all we have done in the past few weeks by the end of next week.

• Sophia will keep up her outreach to identify potential interviewees.

• If the outreach is not successful, we are considering doing a door-to-door approach and to distribute fliers.

• She is going to prepare an interview guide for the project.

Tuesday, Feb 22, 2022, Lawrence

Borrowing wisdom from wise people in SPAA, I was able to narrow the interview sections of this project down to this research question: How low-income households describe the administrative burden of federal energy assistance programs (Low Income Home Energy Assistance & Weatherization Assistance Program). The hypotheses formulated around administrative burden theory are:

• Learning costs

  • • • Lack of knowledge about assistance programs decreases the likelihood that people apply for assistance programs (Moynihan et al., 2015).

      • Households located in distant areas from the implementing agencies are less likely to apply for assistance programs (Warlick 1982).

      • People with a lower level of education or language barriers are less likely to apply for programs (Heckman and Smith 2003).

      • People already in other comparable programs are more likely to apply for energy assistance programs (Currie and Gruber 1996).

      • People associated with advocacy groups or who have ready access to application assistants are more likely to apply for assistance programs (Budd and McCall 1997; Kopczuk and Pop-Eleches 2007).

  • Psychological costs

    • • The stigma of applying for low-income programs is a major psychological burden on people who need to benefit from them (Moffitt 1983).

      • People who have encountered administrative practices reinforcing the effect of stigma are less likely to apply for programs (Moynihan et al., 2015).

  • Compliance costs

    • • Difficult application processes or paperwork results in less program participation (Bartlett, Burstein, and Hamilton 2004).

It goes without saying that research is a back-and-forth process. The question and the hypotheses might be updated as we learn more and progress in the project.

A final note is that, today, I learned that some governmental programs are intentionally made burdensome not because the organizations are inefficient but because for a variety of reasons (e.x. lack of funding) they do not want everyone to apply for those programs.

Monday, Feb 21, 2022, Lawrence

Sophia and I just had a fruitful meeting. We reviewed what she had done in the last week. Also, we talked about what next steps we wanted to take. She also walked me through how reshaping congressional areas in Kansas is potentially going to change energy policy in the state. Some of the topics we covered are:

• Developing website (education, interviews, reflections)

• Providing documents for

  • policy scenarios

  • rubric for evaluating interviews

  • checklist for the interviews

• Developing an interview guide and thinking about the overall structure of the interviews

• We talked about making a video presentation and Sophia informed me of the resources that are available on campus for that end

• We talked about the logistics of the project such as communication and timesheet.

• It seems that identifying interviewees is a harder job than I thought so. Sophia is going to reach out to Ty for his input and I am going to consult with Steven here at SPAA to see what they suggest.

Friday, Feb 18, 2022, Lawrence

Things do not always go as planned and a viable project should plan for unplannable. We had to postpone today's meeting to Monday to have a more meaningful conversation. Hopefully, we are going to catch up with the project as I am a little worried about the pace at which we are making progress right now.

Friday, Feb 11, 2022, Lawrence

Sophia and I just met. We went through what we did last week and what we expect to do in the upcoming weeks. Here are some of the topics that we covered and my reflection:

• Sophia showed up right on time for our meeting and I very much appreciated that.

• Based on our first week of working together, I see that she is a very poised researcher who already knows how to manage the work and provide useful documentation.

• I also appreciated the fact that she had reached out to a friend to professionally develop our website. Although I also like to have a better-looking website we decided to keep it simple to make it easy for future people who will be working on the project.

• We decided to develop the website a web that tabs will be added as we cover different topics. Under each tab, we will reflect on the materials and share feedback.

• We (mostly I) see the website, not only as a way to share our accomplishments in this project but a great opportunity to develop an educational knowledge base for people who are interested in the area of energy policy and energy justice.

• According to Sophia, it was helpful to send next week's agenda in bullet points via email.

• Youtube videos of Tony Reames, Jennie Stephens, and Leah Stokes were helpful materials.

• We talked about interviews and how we wanted to approach them.

  • • Sophia has already reached out to some entities and had a plan to do more reach out to make connections with potential interviewees. She seems professional in this regard. (Warm Hearts of Douglas County, Professor Daley, Professor Outka, Ty Gorman, Student Senate at KU, etc.)

    • We are not still clear on what specific groups we want to interview, will it be low-income people, minorities, renters, owners, or what? We are going to read more about interviewing, consult with some advisors and make a decision by the end of next week.

    • We also talked about coming up with some policy scenarios to go through them with our interviewees and see what would be more pleasing to them as policies that could be adopted by local governments.

    • Another thing about interviews about which we talked was how to do the interview. We are supposed to start working on it the week after next, to come with a transcript and practice it.

    • Another topic about interviews was about positionality and how I would be considered as an external outsider while I am an international student with limited English speaking abilities.

• We shared some thoughts about some helpful podcasts such as Local Energy Rules, Energy Policy Now, and A Matter of Degrees. Moreover, we familiarized ourselves with Shalanda Baker, Initiative for Energy Justice, and Urban Energy Justice Lab.

• Finally, we are thinking about coming up with a cool name for this project.

Wednesday, Feb 2, 2022, Lawrence

Sophia, Ty, and I met online on Monday. We went through the details of the money aspect of the program. By the end of the day, Sophia informed me that she will be working on this project. I am glad that after a few months of pursuing this opportunity, we are, finally, at a point where we want to start doing the job. Hopefully, we will both learn a lot in this process.

For all the international students who might read this and might be interested in doing similar projects, since I am not allowed to be an individual contractor, I do not have permission to touch the grant for this project for my compensation. Such money needs to be in the form of an award to be accessible for us. Or there might be other complicated ways out there as well. But I have no more time to spend on the financial aspects of this program. For now, I am happy that Sophia is being paid for her work, and, fingers crossed, this is going to be a successful experience for both of us.

I have a few initial ideas for the interview part of the project:

• We need to identify households who are willing to participate in our interviews. Besides Sierra Club, Warm Hearts of Douglas County who provides energy assistance to individuals, and households might be able to assist us in that regard.

• We need to develop a survey instrument for the interview. So, we need to know what we want to ask. I think there is enough evidence in the literature on what kinds of hardships low-income households are facing to pay their energy bills. So, I think another approach to the interviews would be to provide interviewees with local energy policy scenarios and explain the outcomes to them and see what kinds of policy alternatives are more favorable to them. This would provide us with meaningful policy implications when deciding what policies to adopt at the local level.

• ILSR'r Local Energy Rule podcast could be used as a source to identify local energy policy scenarios.

• Interviewees could be selected in a way to be able to do a comparative study, e.x. men vs. women, low-income vs. wealthy, renter vs. owner, etc.

Thursday, Jan 13, 2022, Lawrence

Zoey and I are setting a time to discuss the project on a Zoom call tomorrow at 11:30 am. According to her, she lives in Lawrence during the school year and has classes on the Lawrence campus. Reading her application, a new idea for linking the LGBTQ+ community and energy poverty came to my mind. We might also discuss this tomorrow and see how things go.