 Hello, let's talk about a search inclusion one more time. Let's explore today how the physical spaces where civil society organizations meet can impact social interaction. So with our guest today, Matthew Bagueta, we look at data from several civil society organizations meetings in Indianapolis, in the United States. And we will try to understand what spaces encourage more interactions? And also, how can meeting spaces actually shape social bonds? So let's dive in. Matthew, welcome to our episode. Thanks for having me. So the first question, of course, tell us about the importance, the relevance of this work. Sure. So for a long time, we've recognized that democracy really needs connected citizens in order to work. Democracies work better when more people know each other and are more connected with another in the society. And globally right now, we're watching democracies struggle. And part of the reason for that might be sort of fraying among the citizens, less social connection without them. One of the ways for a long time that we've understood how citizens can become connected to one another is through civil society organizations. So through the clubs and congregations, membership organizations, service groups, all these things that are sort of beyond the family but are not work, they're not government that people connect through, those are places where new relationships are formed and the more of those that you've built, the better democracies work. So the question for us and for lots of people working in this area is essentially how is it that civil society organizations build those? And how can they do it better? What kinds of things can civil society organizations do to do a better job of getting people connected to them? Let's explore this a little bit more. So I'm curious to know about the specific research gap that you were trying to fill. And so what's the research gap when you and Joko Walters started this research? What were you hoping to find specifically? Sure. So for a long time, civil society researchers have studied activity, right? They've watched people go and participate in meetings and events and activities and they've watched that kind of stuff take place. But they've done a very limited job of sort of looking at the impacts of physical space on how people are interacting in those situations. There's a bunch of other fields of research for sort of urban planning, environmental studies, those kinds of things that really take in space quite seriously for a long time. But those fields have not really looked at civil society and the way that people are engaging in these spaces. So part of our goal here was really to try to bring together those two fields and say, all right, what happens if we start drawing the insights from both of these places and bring it to bear on these civil society organizations and their meetings and events and activities? So that's what we were doing, was trying to sort of connect those insights and ask how does physical space, the physical environment that meetings take place in, how does that shape the amount of interaction that takes place among the people who come together in those parts? So what happens, let us know about the findings. Yeah, so it's interesting. We found less informal conversation, informal social interaction than we expected, right? Like these civil society organizations, these are places where people are choosing voluntarily to come together around some interest that they hold in common. And at least in the meetings and events and activities that we looked at, at about three-fifths of those, people would interact when they were told to, right? They would do the official business, but they didn't do any other social interaction, was no other sort of informal social connection among the people that were there. And that was a real surprise. Like we expected to see much higher rates of informal socializing among people who got together and not just following the script. And it turns out that space seems to be playing at least part of the role in explaining why that happens. So civil society organization meetings that took place in quite small spaces had substantially lower levels of social interaction than those that took place in sort of more medium-sized spaces that everybody fit in well. And that also was kind of interesting for us. You would almost think that you would get more informal social interaction if you had a smaller space which is kind of cluster everybody together in there. But it turns out people interact less when you get them close together. And our hunch on this is that it has to do with how much other people can overhear your conversation. That you might be willing to engage or interested in engaging, but you don't want everyone in the room to hear everything that you're talking about. Instead, you'd like to talk to just these one or two people and a small space doesn't give you even that little bit of sort of conversational privacy to encourage that informal social interacting to take place. So when those small settings people go on in, they do the official business and then they leave because they're like, I don't want everybody else to listen to you. Of course, it's actually interesting and that these are the findings. Let us know, because now I'm curious about this. So about potential policy impacts of your work. Yeah, so there's a couple of ways to think about this. One, you can think about organizers, right? The people who are actually putting on these meetings and events and activities, the people who lead civil society organizations. I think the take home for them is choose wisely, right? And choose with the idea that part of what you're trying to do is build social connection, right? If your goal as a civic organizer is just to accomplish whatever your meeting purpose is, well, maybe a small space, a big space, whatever is gonna do the trick for you because you can tell people and they'll follow instructions. But if part of what you wanna do is get the people who are affiliated with your organization to know each other better, to connect with each other, which is good organizing practice because if that happens and people build those relationships, they're more likely to stay engaged with your organization all the time. Well, then you need to choose a space and design your meetings and your events in a way that gives people the opportunity to make those social connections with one another, right? So choose your spaces wisely and build your meetings according. In policy terms though, local governments and sort of very large nonprofits that have spaces that they own are often the locations where these kinds of smaller civil society events take place. And that's because relatively few organizations have the resources to own and provide spaces to others. Those organizations, large nonprofits and especially local governments, I think need to think much more self-consciously about providing a more varied array of spaces for civil society organizations in their communities to use. So if they're providing more spaces of different sizes that gives more flexibility to civil society organizers to choose the right one that's gonna create that right dynamic for the meeting that they're holding. Of course, straight on point free policy tips for both civic organization leaders and policymakers. Matthew, let's look at the now what. So we've covered the, so what's the research? So what about it? Let's look at what now. So what are some future research venues from now on? Sure. So one of the interesting and advantageous things about this study, one of the kind of new angles that we took on these was using a data collection technique called systematic social observation to collect the data that we have to make these analysis. And this is a technique that has been used for a long time but not that consistently in psychology and sociology. And the approach is basically you create a detailed survey form, but rather than handing it out to individual people and having them fill out the survey. So say all the members of these civil society organizations instead of giving them the survey to fill out and say what was your meeting like? Instead you train a research assistant to go and attend the meeting and sit there and watch and fill out the survey as they go. But this has some huge benefits in terms of the kinds of data that you can collect because you're not asking someone who participated in a meeting to just remember what it was like during the meeting and report on things. Instead you can send someone who was carefully trained to watch for certain dynamics that you're looking for and have them collect that. But if you do it in this way where it's standardized you can do it at larger scales than some other research techniques are allowing you to do. And so that's really the direction we've been pushing this. It's taken us 10 years to really develop the technique to be able to use it in these civil society organizations. And now we're expanding that. We're trying to do a lot more on that front. We've got a new study going on now with many more organizations to try and get an even bigger picture of the kinds of interactions that are taking place and the ways that things like space and plenty of other dynamics are shaping how much interaction is happening and what goes on. We also are kind of pushing forward on precision in measurement. So I was talking about the sizes and rooms. One thing that we've done in this new version of the study is to try to get a really precise measurement of how big every space is. So we will send our research assistants in all of these laser pointers that measure the dimensions of rooms so we can get to the centimeter measurements of every space that's in there and really get a sense of how dense people are when they get in the spaces. So we're trying to push forward on that dimension as well. That's very interesting. Matthew, what other materials, other content can you share with our listeners to further explore this topic? Oh, sure. So we, like I said, we've been working on this project in various forms for a long time now. We're putting all of our materials are on our project website, which is oce.indiana.edu. OCE stands for Observing Civic Engagement, but the shorthand is just OS. So it's os.indiana.edu and that has, all of our published papers are there and you can link to those from there so you can look at more that we've written about the technique itself and how to apply it in these settings. And as more of our substantive findings come out, we'll be putting those up there as well. This is a kind of a labor-intensive project. So we always have a big research team so you can meet all of our research team members there and we'll keep putting other materials up there as well. We've got links to other talks that we've given. So that's a great resource if you're interested in this kind of material. Of course, and to our listeners, following up on what Matthew just said, if you're watching us on, let's talk about social inclusion website, scrolling down your web, all these recommended materials for direct access. Matthew, this has been a straight on point episode about the importance and potential impacts and venues for the future. Let's close this like with the grand finale. If there is anything you want our audience to remember about this talk, two, three sentences at the punchline, what would it be? So I would say that people need to realize that civil society can definitely help democracy. We've got lots of research to show that. But we need to be very aware of how that works. And we need to provide civil society organizations the resources that they need to be able to help democracy, to help people connect with one another. And then we need to make sure that those CSO organizers are using those resources wisely to bring people together and provide the connections that are gonna make democracies work better. Matthew, it was a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, this was great. For those who are watching us on YouTube, you can find all the resources, as I said before, all the materials of this conversation on the Let's Talk About Social Inclusion website. And you can also listen to this episode, whatever you get your podcast, you're able to subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter at KojitatuLTA.