Opportunities for Further Research

When interviewing nonprofits, many community leaders mentioned seeing members of their community distance themselves due to fear of this administration's anti-immigration policies. At the same time, those policies were a common catalyst for our interviewees to naturalize. There’s an opportunity to conduct more targeted research with LPRs that have decided not to obtain citizenship or are putting the decision off. While we were able to meet and speak with a few, this population remains elusive and were difficult to recruit, possibly due to fear. Better understanding of this population could illuminate the barriers or rationale for not naturalizing, which could be counteracted through messaging or policy changes.

Additional interviews of friends and family of naturalized citizens would be helpful. This group is often responsible for assisting LPRs through the naturalization process, so it would be useful to better understand how they communicate with applicants they know and how they help them overcome any barriers to naturalize.

More quantitative research is needed on the catalysts for naturalization, which would allow us to see how catalysts map back to certain demographics. This would make it easier to determine what messaging was most efficient for which people.

During the last two months of our research, we began testing messaging to determine what outreach could best be used to cause LPRs to seek out more information about naturalization. Additional testing is needed to identify strategies and content that can assist nonprofits and other groups in increasing the number of LPRs they assist in naturalizing. Testing could be conducted virtually, making it easier to facilitate.

Lastly, we created a low fidelity prototype based on several features we believed would be helpful in assisting with naturalization. We developed several iterations and tuned the features based on feedback we received. We were able to understand which features would be more desirable for users. Additional testing, or building a functional prototype, could help fine-tune interactions and pave the way for a lightweight tool that can be relied upon to make the application process easier and more approachable.