Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Updates
It has been a while since I last blogged, but there has been a lot of work in the background. I attempted to organize a focus group, with young college aged African-American women and older career oriented women, but I was not able to compliment everyone's schedule. I have decided to revert to the individual interview format because it will be easy to work around people's schedule. I have an interview scheduled for today and Friday and I am in the process of scheduling more for the weekend. I have also read more literature on the topic of beauty and hair in the African-American community. The authors who I have read contribute the stigmatization of African features to slavery. I will explore this more in depth in a seperate blog, but I realize it will be a fundamental part of my final paper. I have also been searching for statistics related to African-Americans spending habits compared to other ethnicities. I believe this will be a good link for establishing the issue of beauty among the African-American community.
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That's important background research on previous stigmatization of black features.
ReplyDeleteIt's also an important foothold to establish about proportion of spending on beauty products and treatments.
Of course, you wouldn't want people to think that if a group spends more or less on something than the dominant group that they're wrong or irrational. Who's to say? We'd want to understand the spending in the context of their various positions and cultures.
One related topic that help you explain that would be how the identity symbols for members of minority cultures tend to be more important or salient for them than for members of the dominant group.
Another, related to income, might be how the spending of low income groups tends to differs from that of middle and upper income groups. For example, are the proportions of one's income spent on certain things different across income levels? Hmmm.