¡Adelante!

We've finished training research assistants and piloted the survey in the field over the weekend.

The pilot was an opportunity to make sure the research assistants were understanding the survey contents, administering it correctly and recording answers clearly. After spending the last six months putting this survey together, all the questions seem blatantly obvious to me, but even after going over it in the classroom during training, there were still parts that required clarification for the RAs.

The pilot also gave us a chance to see if there were any problematic spots in the survey: flow, comprehension, translation, clarity, etc. Issues definitely emerged, and sitting down with the research assistants to discuss the problems they encountered was really helpful in ironing out these issues in the next (and hopefully last) set of revisions.

For our next steps, we're hoping to actually start collecting data on Saturday, and in the meantime, we face the task of figuring out exactly how we will select houses in the different communities. A matter that has significantly complicated this task is the difficulty we've had finding Haitian households. Doing a purely random sample in the community may miss the Haitian demographic entirely, as they live in places that wouldn't necessarily be considered a house in a regular household survey protocol. Since Haitians are a major focus of our research (and half of our research assistant team is Haitian), its necessarily we find them but in a systematic way so that statistically, we can make comparisons between the two groups during our analysis.

We've got our work cut out for us and its exciting to be moving forwared. ¡Adelante!