My Job

So, I've barely talked about my job here. It's been kind of lame for the past couple of weeks. I've been transcribing these interviews with healthcare providers. Yeah,they're in english and that should be easy enough, but they have STRING accents and the woman conducting the interviews has an accent AND sh talks fast. I don't like her. Her voice bothers me, to the point of kind of grossing me out. And I think she's really screwed up with some of the interviews, letting the doctors go on tangents without answering the given question, and will ask questions based on these tangents. She'll also complete their sentences for them! AHHHHHHHHHHHHH! SO wrong! She's screwed with the data and it totally bugs me. And one final thing, she'll ask a question, the interviewee will not understand it, and the interviewer will get flustered, try to explain with INCOMPLETE SENTENCES. She doesn't complete her thought and it totally frustrates me. I don't like her. She was also supposed to all this transcribing (which would have been better coz her English is crappy), but bailed. People suck sometimes. If you say you're going to do something, do it. Don't commit and bail.

So, that's done! Yay! And we on our way to disseminating our research results. We haven't complied all the results. We're still conducting final in-depth interviews, maybe 15 more to finish up. Basically we did baseline surveys, follow-up and final follow up. The survey asked about the marital relationship, contraception use, HIV/AIDS, and I'm blanking on the rest. I'm bad.

Anyways, before we disseminate this information back to the community, not just the study participants but the community as a whole, we want to conduct some focus groups. These focus groups will be with women participants, and we will be doing some role plays to present some of our study results. We want to talk to these women on what information needs to be shared, how to present this information to best reach the community (in order for the community to understand it), what they want us to share and who this information should be given to (policy makers, professionals, other communities, etc). It's a pretty cool concept. This information is the community's and we came in and gathered information. As researchers, it's our duty to bring this back to them before we take it to others.

So this week we've been training our field team (the women who have been with the study and have done all the interviews and surveys). We've been training them on the importance of FGDs (Focus group discussions), why we use them and then going through mock FGDs. The FGDs will be done in Tamil and Kannada. We initially wrote the scripts in English, but we had to make many changes on it, so started to do back translations. That was fun because I was able to help with the Tamil part and if I understand then these will will understand. It's been exciting to watch the mock FGDs and role plays. Our field team has been able to given so much invaluable information, such as how to better present it, what changes we may want to make, and how to transition better along with many other things. We have such a talented group of people working here. Everyday I learn so much. They're all really incredible. I think if I didn't have that, I wouldn't make it here in B'lore.

So that's where we're at right now. We'll be doing our first focus group next Thursday which I will be going to. I believe that one will be in Tamil, so I'll sit to the side and take some notes. It's SO good for me to be around people who speak Tamil. I speak in mostly English at work, and in most shops use a mix of English and Tamil. When I got to stores most people speak to me in English, as they do with everyone else. And I haven't been out and about much lately. Been too busy. Having only one day off takes a toll and gives me limited time to get out. By the time Saturday afternoon comes, after I get home from work (which is usually around 1:30), I just want to nap, but I digress.

Anyways, so we're on our way into the dissemination process. We will conduct about 4 FGDs and take this back to our Ethics Committee for their review before we move forward. It's getting more exciting.

Oh, and I leave for Goa in 8 days. I really need to get out of Bangalore.........

Peace.