Return from the field, and some delayed pictures

After two months of hard work, we went out in the field last week to do some first test runs of the survey. There's only so much survey design you can do sitting behind a desk, the only way to see if you're doing a good job is to go and actually try asking people questions.

We did a couple of days of focus groups to test out some ideas and questions that needed some more work, and on our fourth day in the field, we put the whole thing together and went out excitedly to run through the whole first draft of the survey. And it crashed and burned. Our enumerators didn't know the questions well enough because we had just put it all together that day, the formatting was a disaster, and the respondents didn't understand half of the questions we asked. The woman my enumerator and I were interviewing didn't invite us in, so were standing outside of her door juggling clipboards and papers, trying to keep her attention as children ran in and out the door, until she basically kicked us out because we had taken too much of her time. Things didn't look good.

So the next day was a long one - trying to figure out how to fix all of the problems from the night before, how to make the questions clear and understandable and how to make them measure the things we wanted to measure, all in time to run it again that day. At about 4 in the afternoon we decided to stop with what we had and go try it again. And it was a thousand times better. But still far from done. So now I'm in the office with a big pile of surveys to go through to make the last draft to take out for a big trial run next week. Amazing how quickly things go when your time is running out.

These last few weeks I will be in the field most of the time. It's a little tiring, and I miss my hot shower and my vegetables, but I'm glad to be getting out and doing the field work I came to Bolivia for.

And here's the second-to-last installment of photos from our vacation. I'm a little faster with the writing than I am with the photos, sorry.