Getting back in the field!

7/15/2011

I'm starting on a new research project in Tanzania this August to, broadly, study health and poverty in communities around the Serengeti. The project, Conservation Research for East African Threatened Ecosystems, is organized through the Frankfurt Zoological Society. The overall goals, as you can see, are rather expansive:

Inter-relationships and feedback between poverty, health, disaster management and environmental sustainability investigated and links between policy and practice decisions better understood.

My case study, within this enormous project, will investigate family planning practices and maternal health through an extensive household survey and project population growth and the impact on natural resources. This, also, is hugely broad.

To bring all these ideas, researchers and methodologies together, the FZS is planning a workshop for several days in the Serengeti! Sweet. I'll be traveling through Nairobi and Arusha on my way to Seronera for the conference. I'll also be in Europe for two weeks with my family before East Africa, so this blog may begin to look more like a travelogue, but I'll try to keep it interesting.

3 Comments

Nikhil

7/27/2011 02:14:03

I love summer – summer reading, specifically. I’ve been able to read so many works of fiction: The Stieg Larsson Trilogy, Water for Elephants, The Southern Vampire Mysteries, the Minnesota Budget Compromise…it is refreshing to jump back into thought provoking reading via this blog! While I goof around, you’re about to start a really interesting project in Tanzania after being a witness to a nation’s grief in Norway.

Does the research project you are on consider infrastructure? Understood that it is a really broad conservation-related project and you haven’t been to the workshop yet, but I can’t help but believe that infrastructure (roads, telephone lines (or cell towers), etc.) is a crucial component to maternal health (proximity to hospital, water) and family planning through educational programs. Clearly this isn’t a topic I’ve studied, but do we see lower/higher population growth when a family has access to a road…

Good luck! Happy studies and travels!

Aine

8/10/2011 05:45:12

Khil,
First day of the workshop today. We had a couple of hours on the importance of randomization (helloooo APEC 8212) in which the prime example by a few Tanzanian practitioners was the need to have control and treatment groups with equal access to the main road. I thought of you and then got shaken like a polaroid picture in the back of the land rover on the way back to the hotel.

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7/31/2012 12:25:54

We were very interested to see your comments about using PDAs for data collection. Young Lives has carried out 3 rounds of a longitudinal household and child survey using pen and paper. We started to use PDAs in Round 3 in some of our sites, and are planning to use them in all 4 of our study countries in the next survey round. We are working in some very remote sites so there were many factors to consider, which we set out in our Methods Guide. Our Peru team also reviewed the potential bias that might be introduced by using PDAs. They found no significant differences between the results obtained from PDA-based questionnaires and paper-based questionnaires. But they also concluded that training for fieldworkers is important to ensure that their interaction and rapport with survey respondents does not suffer due to them focusing on the technology rather than the person they are interviewing.

Getting back in the field!

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Aine Seitz McCarthy

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