Identifying the Cultural and Social Groups in Your Catchment Area

One of the most common questions I get from students and folks in my professional development sessions is how to build cultural proficiency when there isn’t a way to predict whose children will have developmental delays or which families will be referred to their caseloads. Though none of us can control exactly those who will end up on our caseloads, we do have control of the geographical region, or catchment area, that we serve. Depending on caseload size, population density, EI practitioner specialty, and availability, catchment areas may be as large as several counties or as small as a single neighborhood. Familiarizing ourselves with the demographics of our catchment area is the first step to acquiring cultural knowledge.

I’ve isolated several effective data collection strategies to aid in helping you learn more about the people in your neighborhood. These include personal experiences, listening to anecdotes from your peers, reviewing school district and census data, speaking to local community leaders, and doing internet searches for local houses of worship, affinity groups, languages spoken, and recent immigrant groups in your community.

No one strategy or data source will tell you everything that you need to know about your catchment area, so you’ll have to be savvy when collecting your data. For example, my hometown is Salem, MA. Through my lived experience in the community, I know that this community has a relatively large number of Hispanic/Latine families. I can’t recall every source of the anecdotal data I gathered to come to know this, but I am certain that it includes my own observations of who I see at the grocery store, the families that I see when I pick my daughter up from school, and the signs I see in local business that are in Spanish and English. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to pinpoint exactly how you know some of the things about your community that you know, and that’s okay. Our lived experiences are valid data as long as we make sure to combine them with other sources of information.

Based on my own experiences living in Salem, I wasn’t surprised when I looked at U.S. Census data that reported that 20% of all Salem residents self-identify as Hispanic. Then, I searched school district demographic data,I learned that 47% of the students in our public schools are Hispanic/Latina. While this seems like a fair amount of information, I still didn’t have many details about the Latine families in Salem. I didn’t know how many of these families speak Spanish at home or if they do, what dialect(s) of Spanish they speak (Spanish is the official language of 21 diverse countries, which creates an opportunity for many dialects to emerge. Think about how different American English, British English, and Australian English are). This data also didn’t tell me anything about each family’s heritage, culture, or religion. It also didn’t indicate if these families have lived in the United States for multiple generations, if they are first generation, or if they are newly immigrated to the U.S., all of which are key factors that influence family culture, values, and ways of being.

At this point in my fact-finding mission about the Latine community in Salem, I felt a little stuck. I had hoped that I would get the information I needed through demographic data and while that was a start, I needed more specific information. This was the point at which my spending time in the community walking around and visiting restaurants and other businesses became imperative to my ability to acquire cultural knowledge.

I had learned from the murals in the El Punto neighborhood that there was great reverence for the Dominican Republic as there are several murals that depict images from the D.R. Anecdotally, my friends who teach in Salem shared with me that their classrooms are composed of Dominican-, Salvadoran- and Venezuelan- American students, some of whom are new arrivals and others whose families have lived in the area for a couple of generations. I also learned from speaking with teachers that there is a growing population of immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala who are indigenous Mayans who don’t speak Spanish and don’t consider themselves Hispanic even when their enrollment paperwork classifies them as such. I’d also learned from keeping up with the local school committee agendas that our local public school leaders had been criticized by their students for only offering Spanish language classes based on Spain’s main dialects rather than their home dialects of Dominican, Salvadoran, or Puerto Rican Spanish. Once I had this level of specific information about the heritage groups that make up Salem’s Latine population, I was able to do targeted research about each group to develop a generalized idea about some of the families that could be referred to me as an early interventionist.

While I’ve offered a simplified example of learning about the Latine population in Salem, please keep in mind that our communities are home to families that are diverse in multiple ways. Racial, ethnic, and language diversity may be the most evident in your community. Still, other identity factors influence families’ decisions to settle into a town, creating larger subsections of the town’s citizens. Another draw for many people to a community is access to a house of worship. As you are walking and driving through your catchment area, take note of the houses of worship in the community. This process can give insight into the traditions of faith practiced in the community.

Lastly, there are always going to be identity groups in communities that you may not be able to learn about if you aren’t working to familiarize yourself with the town beyond just googling demographics. For example, Salem is also home to many Gay, Lesbian, and Trans individuals, as well as Queer people and families. While you may not be able to find demographic data that shows exactly how many LGBTQ families live in the area you cover, if you drive or walk through town, you will see rainbow flags in the windows of businesses and on family homes as well as rainbow-painted crosswalks throughout the city. Suppose you follow local news or town social media accounts (which I recommend you do for all the cities in your catchment area). In that case, you may see articles about how Salem annually scores 100% on the Human Rights Coalition’s Municipality Equity Index or that the city hosts an annual Pride Parade.