Ghana Day 12, 8/14/14

We didn’t start our day today until almost 10am, but we drove to the Global Brigades head office so that we could start data analysis of the key informant interviews that we conducted with the three professionals we talked to about women’s reproductive and sexual health. I haven’t done very much qualitative analysis before (all my experience was with the Natural Sciences College Tuition and Budget Advisory Committee information to write our report last year), so I was interested in learning how to effectively conduct qualitative research. With our notes from the key informant interviews we did, we printed them out, read them over and highlighted the key words and phrases from them.

We cut out the phrases that we liked from the papers and organized them into several categories regarding the issues to solve, methods to solve them, and outlets to target to help us. We put together a poster that turned out really well for how little direction we had for it in the beginning, and I’m really happy with the way it all turned out. J

The one thing that did bother me about the activity is that it seemed like we were wasting a lot of resources that could have been easily conserved. Instead of editing the interview notes only after everything is physically printed, we should have edited the notes digitally and printed out only what we thought was most important. That would have saved about 100 sheets of paper. We put everything on poster board as well, which is also unnecessary considering we are to make a PowerPoint presentation from our posters to present that information anyways. Now that I’ve been to so many communities that have so little, including ones where the kids continually ask for pens, I want to be extra mindful of the resources that I use. I have always watched what I use, but I think that the stark contrast of actually using these materials while just a walk away from communities that never use that much paper is something that makes me think about my actions more carefully.

Deanna told us that you usually do a minimum of 12-15 up to about 35 key informant interviews and tried to find more subjects for us to interview (including community members themselves as well as professionals from other organizations that were helping the cause).

We had a lot of free time after we got back, so the rest of the day was very chill. It included a power outage that was pretty long, and I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet but the electricity supply is not constant here; if the demand for electricity exceeds the supply, a power outage results. We have to wait until the generator kicks in to have power again, and the gap can range anywhere from a minute to about half and hour. Luckily, we have electronics and flashlight apps on our phones, but it makes me wonder how people who live in some of the communities we visit cope because they only use their electricity to power their lights and not much else.