Implementation hurdles

Every time I start a new task, it is not carried out exactly the way I planned. This time was no exception. How could I conceive every hurdle I would encounter?

Let's begin with the basics. I don’t speak Bengali, the spoken language in West Bengal, India.  So, to interact with everyone we need an interpreter. But as you can imagine, you can never be sure if the message you are trying to give is given the way you planned. In focus groups, this is a critical issue. Initially, we planned to conduct two focus groups per village to gather as much information as possible. To make things easier, we chose different questions that would convey the insights we needed for our study (breastfeeding practices, access to food, hygiene practices, etc.). The idea was that our interpreter would carry out the focus groups instead of translating every answer to us.

But after the first two villages we knew our interpreter wasn’t steering the conversations in the focus groups, as we needed. We knew that gathering insights from focus groups wasn’t an easy task, but we thought –mistakenly- that the interpreter would carry out the job well enough with a script. Once we discovered she wasn’t generating the insights we needed, we decided to change the dynamic: instead of two we would carry only one focus group and we would be the ones directing the conversation instead of her. She would be translating every answer to us and then –depending on the answers- we would ask more questions. This approach proved to be more successful, as we are gathering interesting insights that I will share in the future.

Another hurdle we encountered was in the actual process of taking the surveys and measuring the children and their mothers. First, we changed survey questions that didn’t work as planned. Second, as we chose randomly the people we would survey, many people in the villages complained they weren’t being measured. This is clearly not an easy problem to solve because it involves telling people that we can’t measure their potentially malnourished daughter because it would generate bias in our estimations. So, we decided that we would measure the complainers without taking their data in our analysis.

Finally, something that I couldn’t know beforehand was how difficult it would be to weight and measure the children. As you can see in the following video, many children are afraid of any kind of contact with strangers. It has been extremely difficult to complete our surveys in each village we have visited.

Now, every time I read a paper, I’ll be thinking in these and other hurdles every researcher must confront. Certainly, as my fellow researcher told me, I will doubt their data is as perfect as it looks while reading the paper.