Crunch time

Hello to all...Pete, I hope you survive! Doesn't sound too fun.

I just finally wrote a huge post on my personal blog, so if anyone wants to see pictures, etc. you can check that one out. This one is of me and Loly Guzman as we drove through the mountains to get to the coast.

So...

I was told last week that I don't know anything about research. Don't let Dr. Thackeray hear that! I was pretty angry, actually, but tried to take Owen's advice (for all of you who remember that wonderful experience at the Dept. of Health) and just shut my mouth and thanked her for her comments. I then went and wrote a rebuttal which answered all of her questions and addressed all of her criticisms (since she hadn't read the proposal and didn't get why I was using a theory to base my questionnaire on) but when I went to discuss it with her she didn't want to hear it. Hmm... she says it's an entirely academic exercise and won't benefit the organization or the country in any way, shape, or form.

The ironic part is that everyone else gets it...just not the research specialist within the PAHO organization. I think she just doesn't listen to try to understand, but to try and find errors and faults. Don't get me wrong, details are important, but you've got to understand the base before you try to understand everything else.

So, we're now working AROUND her. Luckily, Dr. Suriel is really supportive and gets the point of the study, and I had to laugh when he started talking about how she'd said so much about problems with biases since it's a quasiexperimental study with cluster sampling- but she's now so biased against it that there's no way we can change her mind.

I'm finishing up some focus group analyses now so I can write the last few survey questions and then get going with the backtranslation and content, etc. validity processes. We talked about all that and I understand the theory, but I don't remember ever really getting any guidelines for how to do it, so I'm relying heavily on the internet to explain how to really check validity and reliability. Then the pretest group, and I'm set! Hopefully it all gets done before they all get out on summer break...

It's been interesting getting researchers here to back the "new" techniques I'm using. They don't use theory, EVER, so that's been the first hurdle. I think we're mostly past that now, except with Dr. Merino. The second concern for them is the use of an internet based instrument (which is the obvious time saver for me) since they don't know of anyone ever having done that before. I also did some key informant interviews over the phone to get some salient beliefs to go along with my focus group data, which they also said wouldn't work. They only do in person paper and pencil studies, and it took awhile to convince them that our generation (especially students in medical school) are going to be technoligically literate enough to do it...

Yay for different cultures! Hopefuly this turns out well and they realize that they have a lot more tools available than they ever thought before.

Well, take care!