Welcome back. Today is Thursday, August 17th, 2023. This was the Ukweli 2023 team’s eleventh full day in Sierra Leone.
Today was the team’s first day of research. We divided into three groups: Brooke Lee with Alieu, Reeza Chaulagain and Lorraine Rwasoka with Suleiman, and Sterling Salmini with Memunatu. Today was dedicated to conducting pilot interviews so we could assess the quality of our interview questions by looking at the responses we got from the women in the communities near the World Hope International office.
Everyone agreed that conducting five pilot interviews, so that not too much time was lost to these tests, would be most productive. Following that, we planned to feel out the process of translating after the interviews were finished. Moving forward, because we lost so much time waiting for the Institutional Review Board’s approval, we need to make sure that we nail in our questions. We wanted to take today to ensure that our questions will be understood in a way that doesn’t require over-explanation from our translator, while also taking advantage of our translators’ bilingual skills and ability to express the questions comfortably. Most of all, we wanted to ensure questions would not be misinterpreted, and that they will be very direct questions; this way, we can get very direct data that can support our research paper, and have the largest sample size possible.
We decided to have ten “core” questions in our interviews. Those questions came from the question bank we created and shared with our blog. We are not at around thirty in total. The approach Brooke and Alieu took was to start with these questions but adjust course in the event the women didn’t know what human papillomavirus or cervical cancer was. The team would need to switch up which questions should be asked, or the order they were asked in that it would be a productive interview. What we all found was that even when all ten questions were asked, the interviews were only around six to seven minutes max. Instead of cutting the interviews short at these pilot questions, we decided it would be more productive or beneficial for this first day to experiment with other questions from our word bank. This way, each interview was able to hit closer to fifteen minutes, and we got more data and information that we could use later when we re-convened to decide how we move forward for these next interviews.
After each group finished about five interviews, we all walked back and met back at the World Hope International office to start the daunting transcribing and translating process. Each team member sat down with their translators, munched on some food, and whipped out the earbuds that would be shared by translators and team members. We dove into the audio recordings. The ideal process we wanted to go through was transcribing (meaning writing the audio in Krio first), then translating that transcribed text to English. We found that our translators weren’t very experienced or skilled with typing, so every time they were asked to transcribe, they would have to look for the individual letters on the keyboard before typing each letter of a word. Meaning, that when we tried transcribing just one sentence it took well over twenty minutes. This would not work whatsoever.
We decided that wasn’t a sustainable strategy, especially because we lost so much time waiting for our approval. How we are now approaching this process is translating the audio directly into English. So each team member will be on typing duty, and our translators will be in control of the audio. As they will listen to fragments of the sentence at a time, they’ll translate to us what is being said verbatim into English. Even with skipping the transcribing process, Brooke, Lorraine, and Reeza all experienced those translations that took up to five hours to conduct just for the five pilot interviews. Sterling had a slightly different experience and conducted thirteen short interviews with more yes or no results, so the translations didn’t take as long. All of this was valuable insight so that we could compare all the data and make sure that we discussed what we thought went well and what didn’t go well with each audio.
After translating, we went to dinner and we had delicious spaghetti that Professor Khanjan Mehta cooked for us. It was Sterling’s favorite meal of the trip. After the program-wide meeting, we met with Khanjan. The purpose of this meeting was to go over our data and see what did and didn’t work. We found the first four questions were good and got good results. We decided these are valuable questions that would offer concrete data for our paper. The next problem we had to address was that our current question set didn’t yield any unique data; we had a lot of the same responses that Samara Everman had. Khanjan emphasized that we needed to think about the current literature about cervical cancer and human papillomavirus in Sierra Leone, providing something unique.
We asked ourselves what is missing from this information and what we thought we could offer insight on as we are here in the country. We were all intrigued by the idea of cultural concepts on health; specifically, how people perceive sex in their community, male authority, Muslim modesty, and community beliefs.
This, we believe, is valuable insight that there isn’t a lot of data published on. We have tuned our questions a great deal and are super excited to collect some new data. Our team also wanted to address the issue we were running into when we were interviewing when women did not know anything about either cervical cancer or human papillomavirus–how do we continue the interview from there? We decided to format our new document in two sections. The first listed our core questions, then if women did not know anything about the two topics, we followed up with a short script briefly explaining each of those. Sexual education is a pivotal part of our project, as human papillomavirus is caused by sex and leads to cervical cancer. It is crucial then that we address the knowledge issue at the source if we want to impact the preventable problems that eventually snowball into the development of cervical cancer.
Today held many lessons and much progress for our team. We are excited to excel and find our flow with the interviewing. Hopefully, we can hit our goal of two hundred!
Until next time, yours truly,
Ukweli 2023