It’s going to be tricky. You may already be too close to the situation to judge impartially, and a case study is going to be difficult to use as evidence against population-level surveys of well-being, especially for your implied time horizon. You could attempt to benchmark against previous work, e.g. see what the literature has to say about the effects of poverty on diet, educational attainment, etc. in first-world cities, but your one new data point still won’t generalize and it wouldn’t be doing the heavy lifting in your argument for localism at that point.
I have never met the family and don’t plan on meeting them in person. A case worker will be in contact with them. I aim to maintain that distance, merely asking the case worker for data to plug into my spread sheet. The problem is that I do not know what data I should be plugging in.
It’s going to be tricky. You may already be too close to the situation to judge impartially, and a case study is going to be difficult to use as evidence against population-level surveys of well-being, especially for your implied time horizon. You could attempt to benchmark against previous work, e.g. see what the literature has to say about the effects of poverty on diet, educational attainment, etc. in first-world cities, but your one new data point still won’t generalize and it wouldn’t be doing the heavy lifting in your argument for localism at that point.
I have never met the family and don’t plan on meeting them in person. A case worker will be in contact with them. I aim to maintain that distance, merely asking the case worker for data to plug into my spread sheet. The problem is that I do not know what data I should be plugging in.
If at all possible, I think it should really be recommended for you to meet them in person. Helps reduce problem due to Not Measuring What You Think You Are Measuring.