Waiting for chicks to hatch

On Sunday we held a pilot study. It was really exciting to finally see the project in action! We conducted the pilot in four households in Kuliani, Alton’s home village. Each KASO volunteer conducted an interview, Tiane and I took the measurements, and everyone used our pilot checklist to evaluate each other’s performances. The interviews went well, especially the participants’ willingness to share information. The interviewers were not quite as familiar with the questionnaire as they could have been, so a few things got mixed up.

For instance, I knew something was wrong when a couple of the questionnaires indicated that the child had consumed every possible kind of food except milk in the past 24 hrs. I thought the people were just trying to impress us and decided that we needed to do a better job on briefing the participants on the importance of providing honest answers (although it’s already part of our introduction).

Yesterday when we held our pilot evaluation meeting, Charles had summarized the major problems and indicated that what actually happened on the diet recall section was that one person had asked what the child had eaten in the past 4 weeks (the timeframe for the food security section) instead of 24 hours.

We discussed all of the sticky spots we’d uncovered during the pilot, everything from how close to sit to the person you are interviewing to not reading the section headings before questions. Yesterday, the interviewers practiced interviewing one another.

We are all ready to get started, just waiting on the National Health Sciences Research Council to give us the go ahead. They met a week ago, but we’re still waiting on them to finish up with the paperwork.

Today Charles and I met with someone at the council. The minutes from the meeting have to be approved by the chairperson before they will tell us the results. Apparently there is a 50% chance that we will have to do some revisions on the proposal before we can get started with data collection. So, we wait. Charles says I must be as patient as a chick waiting to hatch.