DEVELOPING SUCCESSFUL PUBLIC HEALTH RESEARCH TECHNIQUES
About the Project: Through Engineers Without Borders, I have traveled to a remote Bolivian community to work on a sanitation project. To ensure that the solutions we provide them with is something that they will actually use, our chapter focuses a lot of using public health research techniques, such as focus groups, household surveys, and visual voices, to collect data on the community's beliefs and use them to design a more compatible and sustainable solution. As of right now, due to the pandemic, I am working to create an education plan that can be administered remotely but will still help to improve their health practices and their quality of life.
My Role: Public Health Executive Lead; Planning, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Lead; Project Team Lead
What did I do?
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Designed and wrote a survey based on the Health Belief Model, a social-psychological behavior change model.
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Researched and developed questions for a focus group and a public forum to be held in the community.
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In country, ran visual voices (a community-based participatory research method), two focus groups, a public forum, and collected household survey data.
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After the trip, I collected and interpreted all the quantitative data in order to analyze trends and present the technical team with ideas.
Takeaways/What I Learned:
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Experience in public health data collection
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How to write my own experiments & surveys
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Analyzing and interpreting non-numerical data
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How to read technical research papers
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Teamwork under a tight deadline
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Experience in designing data collection methods and experiments that meet a national standard
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Being cognizant of cultural differences