My CBL project was with the community partner The World In A Garden. The details of what my group and I did can be found in an earlier post titled “TWIAG.” But right now, I’m not writing to discuss what we did but rather to reflect on my sentiments towards our project as a whole and discuss some of the steps that we as a group took in order to accomplish what I mentioned in the earlier post.
The primary idea of the project was building a survey that would be able to reflect the knowledge of the community and interests of the community. To figure this out we initially began with a list of questions that evaluated people’s nutritional knowledge such as “which of the following has the most vitamin C” and other questions that matched the sort. This then brought into question whether the populations in depth nutritional knowledge was as important, the main idea of the survey was to figure out how to better serve the community. In this case, we determined to ask a larger variety of food lated questions and value based questions such as “which of the following about food matter more to you?”, “Which of these grows in the fall?”, and the like. This different approach, we thought would give us a much better understanding of what they knew about the food they consumed beyond the nutrients, things about food they found important, and due to the rarity of being asked such questions may cause a stirring of interest towards this subject of food. We then decided to further add open ended questions that blatantly asked “what would you like to hear more about” and the like. These questions would allow us to understand more of what they cared about and would give them a chance to elaborate or rationalize their answers. Finally, we added in statistical questions that would help us understand the person taking the survey by asking about how many they feed, and their approximate age grouping. The culmination of these ideas created a rough draft of the survey.
The survey was then further refined and the questions made to be more specific to what we wanted to know in specific. Each question now gave us very precise information which could be graphed and statistically analyzed (of course the open ended questions couldn’t be analyzed in this way, so accordingly, the open ended questions would be individually interpreted. This allowed us to arrive at our final set of survey questions. We initially posted the survey on surveymonkey but then found it to be a poor medium for our purposes. So we created PDF versions of the survey, one with pictures and one without. We ended up using the one without pictures so that the questions would all be “fair” and not left for people to interpret according to the pictures. The final survey was then pilot tested at TWIAG at an event. A variety of cooperative individuals filled the survey out, although not everyone took it as seriously as we hoped. Regardless, this process of survey development proved to be useful and I really find it to be an asset for future projects that require the use of such tools. Currently, we are in the analysis phase and the results seem to get more interesting daily.
All in all, I’d like to think of TWIAG as a positive experience, albeit patches of miscommunication with our community partner as well as minor group misunderstandings. Really, I’m thankful for my group and being given the opportunity to be part of such a project.
`rtang