Students and families
People who needed understandable information about the environment in which students learned.
Researching drinking-water information access in Michigan schools
This mixed-methods project examined drinking-water safety in Michigan public schools, with attention to regulatory oversight, communication gaps, resource disparities, and implementation challenges following Michigan’s Filter First legislation.
4 min read · Original project artifacts
RoleResearcher (graduate project)
TimelineAug – Dec 2023
Team / settingGraduate research project
Methods / toolsStructured data collection · interviews / expert insights
· affinity diagramming · synthesis
200+research notes synthesized
3core research themes
2023graduate research project
The research context
This University of Michigan research project examined drinking-water information and oversight in Michigan schools, with a focus on the Ann Arbor school context. It was a public-interest research study rather than work for a commercial company.
Our team considered how students, parents, administrators, public-health professionals, and policymakers encountered the issue differently. The research connected infrastructure and resource constraints with questions about communication, access to information, responsibility, and public trust.
My role and contribution
I contributed to research synthesis and affinity mapping, working with more than 200 research notes, expert insights, and interview findings. My role was to help turn varied evidence into themes that could explain how the problem operated across stakeholders.
The work combined secondary research, interviews, expert perspectives, and team interpretation. We organized the evidence into broader relationships rather than treating each observation as an isolated finding. The available presentation notes document the themes communicated by the team.
What needed to change
The problem could not be understood only as a question of individual water fixtures. Schools operate within a larger system of infrastructure, funding, guidance, testing, communication, and oversight. Different people needed different information to understand that system and act within it.
Our challenge was to identify the relationships between those factors without flattening them into a single cause. We needed a synthesis that made the communication and coordination problems visible alongside the physical and resource issues.
School staff and administrators
Stakeholders balancing implementation, resources, communication, and institutional responsibilities.
Public-health and policy stakeholders
People shaping guidance and coordination across schools and government systems.
How I approached the work
Collect evidence from more than one perspective
We brought together research notes, interviews, expert information, and policy-related material. Each source described a different part of the system and helped the team move beyond assumptions based only on one stakeholder’s experience.
The research took place during fall 2023, a period when the state policy landscape was changing. We treated that time context as part of the study rather than presenting the findings as a current compliance assessment.
Use affinity mapping to make patterns visible
I helped synthesize more than 200 notes into clusters and higher-level themes. Affinity mapping allowed us to compare observations, identify recurring relationships, and develop a shared interpretation of the evidence.
This process required decisions about what belonged together. Infrastructure concerns, communication gaps, and resource constraints could overlap, but grouping them carefully helped explain the different mechanisms behind a broad problem.
Connect infrastructure with coordination and communication
The presentation notes describe themes around aging infrastructure, evolving standards, and coordination between state and school systems. Those themes showed why a technical or policy response also needed a clear information pathway.
Our synthesis considered who needed to know something, what they could do with that information, and which organization held responsibility. That perspective made gaps in communication and resources more legible.
Present a system-level interpretation
The team used the themes to explain how oversight, infrastructure, public awareness, and school resources interacted. The deliverable was a research synthesis and stakeholder-oriented presentation rather than a deployed product.
The next design opportunity would be to test ways of communicating responsibilities and water-quality information with the people expected to use them. That is a future research direction, not an intervention completed in this project.
What shaped the direction
The research themes pointed toward connected information and coordination needs.
| What mattered | The response | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure conditions and available resources affected implementation. | Consider operational context alongside the information being communicated. | Avoid treating awareness alone as the solution. |
| Stakeholders held different responsibilities and information needs. | Map who creates, communicates, receives, and acts on information. | Make ownership and handoffs easier to understand. |
| Standards and expectations were evolving during the study. | Keep the time period and policy context explicit. | Prevent historical findings from being mistaken for a current assessment. |
| A large volume of notes described overlapping concerns. | Use affinity mapping to connect observations into shared themes. | Provide an interpretable foundation for future design work. |
What the work achieved
The project produced a synthesis of 200+ research notes, organized themes, and a presentation explaining communication and resource issues across the school-water system. Its contribution was a clearer view of the problem and the stakeholder relationships involved.
The work did not test school water, certify compliance, or implement a district-wide intervention. The findings describe research conducted in fall 2023 and should be understood within that historical project context.
What I would carry forward
This project helped me see information access as an organizational problem as well as an interface problem. A clearer page cannot resolve an unclear responsibility, and a policy does not communicate itself to everyone affected by it.
I would bring the same synthesis discipline to future public-interest research: preserve stakeholder differences, make the evidence traceable, and distinguish what the research establishes from the interventions that still need to be tested.