This is an excerpt from the proposal for this project :
Some common regional names are doubtless familiar, 'New England', 'the South', 'the Southwest', 'the Midwest'. These kinds of designations are widespread in our everyday conversations, but how well-defined are these common terms? Are we all referring to the same places when we use them, or do these terms mean different things to different people? Do such demographic factors such as educational level, economic status, age, or current location, contribute to a person's understanding of region? Or, just as importantly, are people in the United States rather indifferent to regional issues?
We have many ways to talk about diversity in our country, but our geographic diversity is relatively ignored. We, as a society, have devoted much research to studying differences between people of varying sexes, ethnic backgrounds, income levels, and many other criteria. But comparatively little research has been done on distinctions between people from different areas of the country. We lack a vocabulary which can be used to shape perceptions and arguments, offer a fuller understanding of who we are as a people, and perhaps shape social policy in the ways research on other kinds of diversity has done.
The vernacular region, or just region, could be an important addition to the way we talk about diversity. I hear people talk about different regions of the country as different places, but I have heard the same terms (like 'Midwest') used to refer to such a wide array of places that I've wondered how useful they currently are. If we could build some consensus and popular awareness of where and what the regions are, they could be a much more useful way of understanding US culture.
Further Reading
Project Proposal
The original project proposal includes an outline of the project, information on previous research into US regions, a bibliography, and more. 11 pages.
Project Assessment
The post-project assessment includes much of the same basic information as the proposal. It adds a tour of the
project website and survey tool, and a review of the data gathered by the project. 40 pages.
Impressions of Influential Regions
I've also provided a document exploring the SQL queries behind one line of inquiry the project examined, trying
to compare respondents' designation of a region as 'influential' with their assessments of that region as either
favorable or unfavorable. The outcome seems to be that people tend to have a much higher impression of places that
they marked 'influential'. This document describes the database analysis I used to arrive at that conculsion. 4 pages.