Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

The outlying cities of Phoenix's West Metropolitan experienced rapid growth in the past ten years. This trend is only going to continue with an average expected growth of 449-891% between 2000 and 2035 (ADOT, 2012). Phoenix is not new to growth and has consistently seen swaths of people added to its population. This raises the question of what happened to the people who lived in Phoenix's West Valley during this period of rapid change and growth in their communities? What are their stories and what do their stories reveal about the broader public history of change in Phoenix's West Valley? In consideration of these questions, the community oral histories of eight residents from the West Valley were collected to add historical nuance to the limited archival records available in the area. From this collection, the previous notion of "post-war boomtowns” describing Phoenix’s West Valley was revealed to be highly inaccurate and dismissive of the residents' experiences who lived and formed their lives there.

The outlying cities of Phoenix's West Metropolitan experienced rapid growth in the past ten years. This trend is only going to continue with an average expected growth of 449-891% between 2000 and 2035 (ADOT, 2012). Phoenix is not new to growth and has consistently seen swaths of people added to its population. This raises the question of what happened to the people who lived in Phoenix's West Valley during this period of rapid change and growth in their communities? What are their stories and what do their stories reveal about the broader public history of change in Phoenix's West Valley? In consideration of these questions, the community oral histories of eight residents from the West Valley were collected to add historical nuance to the limited archival records available on the area. From this collection, the previous notion of "post-war boomtowns” describing Phoenix’s West Valley was revealed to be highly inaccurate and dismissive of the residents' experiences who lived and formed their lives there.

Our thesis project is a 5-person group thesis that was created over the span of two years. In the summer of 2020, at the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, our group first met and discussed our shared interests in mask-wearing and individual factors that we each thought had significant impacts on mask-wearing among Barrett students. We each decided on factors that we wanted to investigate and subsequently split into three main groups based on our interests: culture and geography, medical humanities, and medical and psychological conditions. Despite these different interests, we continued to treat our thesis as a five-person project rather than three different projects. We then constructed a survey, followed by several focus group sessions and interview questions to ask Honors students. In January 2021, we received approval from the IRB for our project, and we quickly finalized our survey, focus group and interview questions. In February 2021, we sent out our survey via the Barrett Digest, which we kept open for approximately one month. We also sent out advertisements for our survey via social media platforms such as Twitter and Discord. Following completion of the survey, we contacted all of the respondents who stated that they were interested in participating in focus groups and interviews. Focus groups and interviews were conducted in March and April 2021, and results were analyzed and correlated to our individual subtopics. Each of the focus group and interview participants received $50 each, and three randomly-selected students who completed the survey received $25 each. From April 2021 until April 2022, we analyzed our results, came to conclusions based on our initial topics of interest, and constructed our paper.