Field Hibernation

Transcribing interviews takes a long time!  This morning it took me nearly 3 hours to listen through each interview and to copy down word for word what was said.  I am glad I did it because it is helping me analyze much more closely and hone my questions/interview protocol.  The more interviews I do, the better… my data will be validated by the number of people I talk to.  For example, if I find that, on average, a large number of people spend X amount of time X number of days per week then it might be safe to assume that they are not sedentary as a population.

I enjoyed the day.  African time is very slow, but that’s alright.  I kind of feel like I am in hibernation right now; there is a lot of downtime doing research like this here.  This time at Luther on any other given year would be fraught with stress and little free time.  I am really happy with all the time that I have to read freely, write thoroughly and think deeply; especially because there is no pressure in any way to actually do those things (except writing/transcribing for my project).

One thing that I felt I did right about my interview process yesterday was thoroughly explaining my project, in terms of Interview Protocol, and how I wanted to do the informed consent forms.  This was well before actually going to the interviews, so my translators knew pretty well how I wanted it to go and what they should expect to explain to the respondents.  It’s really one thing that made the interviews go well.  I will try to stay consistent with that pre-interview talk with the translators in the future.

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