Friday, June 12, 2009

One week down...

It’s the end of our first week in the field. I am becoming more at ease with the unpredictable and at times uncontrollable forces impacting research in the field. But there are still many trying moments, to be sure. I spent the whole of my Research Methods course last semester doing a literature review and planning my methodology for this internship. I’m fairly confident I prepared myself as best I could. And yet, a lot of the planning and the research theory just falls to pieces when faced with the realities of conducting a study on the ground. It’s a little discombobulating at times, but all you can do is go with the flow, and do your best given the information and resources at hand.

Methodologically, we are moving ahead at a decent speed. We’ve made a timeline of tasks for the remainder of our time in Mbour, and for Tamba and Kolda as well. Our survey questions are drafted, and Oulèye is doing the final edits in French. Hopefully we can plug them into Sphinx later today and get some printed copies ready for Monday. We’ve also made a tentative plan for the final product(s) of our work.

So far, for Mbour, we’ve had an interview with the sage-femme (midwife) and the IEC Technician, Babaco, but we still need to interview Mbacke himself! He hasn’t had more than 10 minutes to spare for us over the past five days due to the workshop for young artists that was going on Tuesday through Thursday. Today he has gone to Thiès to collect some reports for the HIV testing program. Tomorrow, (Saturday) he will be at the CCA for a workshop with survivors of rape. I plan to stop by the Center in the morning around 10:00 to peek in on the workshop and perhaps establish some contacts with youth present. After that, I’m having a real weekend holiday in Saly, damnit!

We are getting down to the wire in finding our youth sample for Mbour since we only have a week left here. I’ve made a contact with the young artists’ cooperative (mostly young men), and a man named Philippe who leads a vocational training program in sewing for young women who have dropped out of school. Hopefully these two groups will serve as good launching points for our snowball sample for surveying the youth. We’re also planning on going to the fish market and maybe the market where Chinese electronics are sold to find some survey participants. We don’t anticipate these surveys will inform the bulk of our findings, but they will certainly play a role in our overall assessment of the impact of “sensibilisation” in the community.

This morning I called Laty at UNFPA Dakar to see if we could get our hands on the evaluations already conducted by UNFPA on the CCAs. These evaluations will serve as critical background to avoid duplicating what’s already been done. The main thing to keep in mind with this study is that we are searching for new solutions and innovative strategies to target out-of-school youth. My worst fear is that we’ll unknowingly propose a previously failed strategy…

I sent the informed consent forms I drafted last semester to the translation company with whom I worked in Austin to see if they could cut us a deal for translation into French. Oulèye seemed very opposed to the idea of using the informed consent forms at all. I told her that we are obligated to inform research participants of the rights and responsibilities involved in the study, and to ensure their confidentiality. What validity would our research have if we can’t document that we did it in line with an ethical protocol? She said, “You’ll see. No one is going to sign those forms.” That may very well be the case, but we have to at least try, and we at the very least have to verbally inform participants of their rights and our responsibilities in the study. After all this talk of how the forms won’t fly, she then said she could translate them in a couple of hours and we shouldn’t send them to my contact. I said, “Oulèye, I’ve worked in the translation industry for over two years; I know how many words a translator can do in a day, and this is a half day’s worth of translation, and a quarter day’s work of editing of legal material; what's more, neither of us is linguistically equipped to do a proper job in the time available to us.” She seemed unconvinced. Just another example of how basic protocol can get shot to hell once in the field.

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