Robert Carver, Professor Emeritus, Stonehill College
The town of Sharon, Massachusetts, created a Governance Study Committee to recommend changes to municipal by-laws and governance within the town, particularly with an eye to elevating civic engagement among residents. I am a member of that committee, and in one phase of our work we sought to confer with officials in similar communities across the state to learn from best practices elsewhere.
There are 351 cities and towns in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and we had limited time and no budget for comprehensive research. We quickly confronted the issue of how to best identify a modest group of communities closely comparable to Sharon, which in turn raised questions about which characteristics are most relevant to citizen participation in local governance.
Using JMP with publicly available data, I conducted a two-stage project to select key variables and then used those variables to run cluster analysis to identify other communities for our research. Because we are an all-volunteer, appointed public body, the research had to be presentable in public forums, comprehensible by a lay audience. Several visualization features of JMP 16 were particularly valuable in that regard.
This talk walks through the analysis, as well as my strategy to make clustering understandable.
