Citrus Festival

Last weekend we went out to El Torno again to do some more focus groups. The focus groups are the first field stage of developing a survey, where you talk to people who are ideally similar to the people you will eventually be surveying to get to know the population a little better so you can design better questions. The first stage of focus groups are wide open - we go in with some general questions, but let the conversation go where it will. This was our fourth trip out to El Torno, the third where we would actually be conducting focus groups - the first was for a coworker to introduce me to someone who was going to help us get some groups together, since you can't just email and set up a meeting. And of course there was the second trip, where we ate chorizo with a bunch of people so they would like us enough to give us an hour of their time.

When we got to the first community outside of El Torno on Saturday we were told that nobody was around because everyone was at the Citrus Festival, to which we had been invited a couple of weeks earlier, but we had forgotten about it. So we turned around, hoping that if everyone was there it should be easy to pull together small groups to talk to us for a few minutes, especially since we had a huge bag of candy and cookies to entice them. But instead we bought a bunch of citrus products, watched the Citrus Queen beauty pagent, and drank local orange liquor with some community leaders (one of whom offered me one of his sons - of my choosing - to marry, one of whom offered me a house to live in while I finish my thesis). Hard work down here in Bolivia.

But on Sunday we did do some real work. We lucked out and were there on the day that everyone was gathering in one of the towns to get their land titles, so we were able to pull some groups aside to talk to. And after a couple of wide open focus groups we decided to give our preliminary questions a try. We had decided to go on this trip on Friday at 4, and we left at 7am on Saturday, so my questions weren't quite in field-testing shape yet, and had been translated by google translator at the last minute. They didn't go so well, so we cut our trip short and came back to the office to work on the next draft. I am learning why it is that you can't just write a bunch of questions and take them out into the field. Measuring things like how much someone cares about the environment is hard in any context, so to do it in another language and another culture is going to require a lot of field testing. Fortunately, this means another trip out into the field next week.

Here are some pictures.