Survey Development

So the Kenyan wing-flapping metaphor? Well, I should have taken that to heart before I took on everything I did this semester. I'm feeling pretty disheveled, as far as my feathers go. I feel kind of how this little guy looks. 

All my flapping usually just barely gets me off the ground, it seems. So many disparate tasks demand my attention. Not only are they hard to keep track of (I now have six different to-do lists on Gmail, a planner full of scribbles and a head that's about ready to spin off my neck), but every time I put my mind to something, I feel guilty for frittering away time on anything at all. By committing to a couple hours working toward one goal, I sacrifice progress on at least three others and all the while there's a nagging voice in the back of my head reminding me of it. I believe I've come down with a new disorder for the DSM V: graduate-school-induced ADD.

One upside to the whole I-have-no-life-because-I'm-in-graduate-school situation is that I'm learning a lot.  Among other things, I'm working on designing a survey study for my trip to the Dominican Republic this summer. Sounds like a simple task, right? There's a lot more to it than it seems, and I'm finding that out the hard way. Tonight I was doing some research on the Demographic Health Surveys (in public health, these are the grand poobas of surveys and worthy of emulation). The DHS is completed in many, many countries every few years, and they're considered one of the most reliable sources of data on health indicators, progress on Millennium Development Goals, etc. 

During my research tonight, I found a tidbit in which I took great solace. In my struggle to find resources on how to best put together a survey instrument, I found a table outlining the timeline of the execution of a single DHS survey: 18 months. A major survey takes eight months of preparation before you go knocking on any doors to survey people, and data collection occurs over only three of the total 18 months. What's more is that these are executed with tremendous amounts of man-power: field enumerators, supervisors, analysts, the list goes on. Surveys are an iceberg. You see them being implemented in the field, but that's just a small fraction of the work that actually goes into the study. Moral of the story:  I'm in for it, but the learning experience will hopefully be worth the struggle. 

Just keep flapping, just keep flapping, just keep flapping, flapping, flapping...