Image from xkcd

This week we ran into the challenges and joys of recruiting. Our goal is to find at least 15 people to interview, a mix of family caregivers, respite care workers, and people who try to connect family caregivers and respite care workers. At this point, we have interviewed 2 family caregivers and 1 assisted living home employee, and have another interview with a family caregiver lined up for next week and a promise from another care facility employee. I have had to put my cold-calling skills to the test, and stumbled into a couple of awkward recruiting moments. I called one facility, left a message for the administrative staff in charge of respite services, and then called another facility. That second facility put me on hold, and while I was on hold, the first facility called back. I wasn’t sure of the appropriate way to handle that situation, so I tried sending the first facility to voicemail. But then they called a second time. I ended up talking to the first facility again, and they routed me all the way to the corporate office where they still weren’t sure exactly who to put me in touch with, but they promised to get back to me. From this experience, I learned that after leaving a message, it might be best to step away from recruitment calls for a minute, just in case you get a quick call back.

Most of our efforts this week have been focused on recruiting and paper writing. Because we have been a bit slow to recruit participants, Aehong has been trying to get us set up with Dedoose accounts ASAP so we can start analyzing the data we’ve managed to collect at this point. We have our newly set up accounts and are learning how to use them so we can start the real analysis hopefully by the beginning of next week. This means our work will probably have an even more iterative timeline, but that could prove beneficial, since our questions might become more targeted by taking into account information we’ve already gathered. To better keep track of our generally overlapping timeline, Gustavo and I have added it to our general organization spreadsheet, found here.

We have made pretty significant progress on our paper during this time, though, specifically on the Related Works section. Some of the details in the Methods and Introduction section are vague at the moment since a lot of it will depend on our findings and we don’t have a clear idea of what our end product will look like yet. Outlining the introduction has helped pinpoint those sections we don’t have completely defined yet. It has been helpful to get the structure laid out and then fill in where we can, though.

Meetings with Patrick and Aehong have gone well. Both of them are flexible and very interested in hearing our ideas but also eager to offer us guidance when we ask for it (or otherwise indicate that we maybe need some help).