WEEKLY OBJECTIVES

The objectives for this week revolve around the revising of the survey. Since Joanne forwarded our email that contained our first draft of the survey to her contacts to get feedback from the other community partners involved in this project, we were not able to get a response from her until later this week, therefore we’ve postponed one of our objectives from last week into this upcoming week.  As such, our first objective is to make adequate changes to our survey based on the constructive feedback and recommendations given by Joanne, other community partners and our teaching assistant Latika. We will carefully look at the feedback given and come up with ways to change the questions in our existing survey from delivering qualitative results into a way where we can obtain quantitative results that can be used to make a statistical analysis. Our second objective is to complete the consent form that will be given to all the school principals that will be participating in our survey. We want to come up with a full description of our project that includes our objectives, aims and our method of collecting data (survey) in an informative and formal manner.

What have we been able to achieve?

This week we were able to complete the TCPS tutorial course on Research Ethics needed to be able to go into the community and proceed with our project. As such, we were able to participate at the Sustenance festival at Hillcrest Community Centre where we got the chance to get to know the community we will be working with throughout this semester. Through first hand experience, we were able to observe the level of enthusiasm people had for the upcoming community garden by seeing how many people came to the event, the type of crowd that it gathered and the participation levels at each activity. Photos from the event can be seen here. Another achievement for this week was being able to get feedback on the first draft of our survey from Joanne and Latika to  be able to enhance the quality of the data we will be getting from the survey.

REFLECTION ON THIS WEEK’S PROGRESS

We evaluated our progress based on the “What, So What, Now What” framework.

What

Our group had submitted our survey to Joanne (our community partner), Teri (Community Schools Coordinator for Tupper Family of Schools), and Latika (our teaching assistant). In response to our survey, we were faced with a barrage of critique that could be summarized as such “The survey is far too complex, and lacks the ability to be objectively analyzed”. Our survey primarily consisted of quantitative questions and was similar to how we always made surveys in the past. However, while making the survey, we never thought of utilizing another technique. Similarly to this week’s podcast week’s podcast, goose liver seemingly had to utilize gavage, a procedure that involves force feeding geese, in order to produce the butteriest tasting foie gras. However, this procedure is utilized because it is what the farmers are accustomed too, and modifying this belief is difficult (Glass, 2011). Likewise, our group felt familiar with making the survey open-ended, with many qualitative aspects. Our first-draft would not be able to provide statistical analysis required for objective reasoning and therefore we felt like it was mandatory to reevaluate our survey. The feedback given to us from three sources that could be used to measure success indicated that we must look at another method, instead of the qualitative questions we initially presented.

So What

The suggestions and comments made by Joanne, Teri, and our TA helped us to see the problems in our survey and the potential downfalls we might face in doing our data analysis. By creating questions that were qualitative in nature would result in open ended responses that cannot be quantified or statistically analyzed. This meant that there would be a high possibility that our results would be disorganized and difficult to understand if we followed a qualitative method. This made us take a step back and consider Joanne and Teri’s suggestion to take a quantitative approach, which would make data collection and statistical analysis possible. Similarly, in this week’s podcast, Dan Barber was faced with several problems that were commonly associated with the industrial farming method for goose liver such as the inhumane treatment of the geese (Glass, 2011). In order to find an alternative, Barber searched for another approach by Eduardo Sousa, who was using an entirely different principle for his farm by creating a stress-free environment for the geese and relying on their natural instinct to feed instead of gorging them with food (Glass, 2011). The steps that Barber took are similar to that taken by our group, where we encountered a problem with our survey and found an alternative by taking on a quantitative approach.

Now What

By taking suggestions from Joanne and Teri, our group revisited the survey questions and incorporated more quantitative approach. Joanne would like us to include more quantitative questions based on the Likert scale, that is a five-point scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree data collection method. Our teaching assistant, Latika, also provided us with potential survey questions that may help us target the issue effectively. We were able to turn Latika’s suggestions into quantitative questions. Originally our survey consisted of five qualitative and two quantitative questions. Taking our community partners and TA’s feedbacks into account, our improved approach yields a stronger survey with eight quantitative and one qualitative questions. Our editing process can be related to this week’s podcast about Chef Dan Barber’s experience visiting Eduardo Sousa’s farm in Spain. As a foie gras enthusiast, Chef Dan was intrigued by Eduardo’s natural preparation of foie gras (Glass, 2011). Wanting to implement this no-force-feeding practices to his own farm, Chef Dan decided to consult with Eduardo to help him produce higher quality foie gras (Glass, 2011). Although Chef Dan Barber is still going through trials and errors to implement Eduardo’s natural practices, we can learn that the process to achieve greatness can sometimes be lengthy and laborious (Glass, 2011). Our survey’s revising process involved many back-and-forth emails with Joanne; however, our quantitative approach survey has allowed us to specifically target aspects surrounding the school garden and to collect numerical data that is amenable to statistical analysis.

UPCOMING WEEK’S OBJECTIVE

With the confirmations from Sir Charles Tupper Secondary school and the feeder schools to participate in our community garden project online survey, our next upcoming objective is to get responses from Eric Hamber Secondary school and the feeder schools on their agreement to participate in the survey. Then, our second upcoming objective will be to finalize the survey and send the survey link along with an attached consent form to the schools who agreed to participate in this project.

How are we going to achieve these objectives?

In order to collect the responses from Eric Hamber and the feeder schools, we intend to email them regarding to their willingness towards participating in the survey. The information of the email address will either be provided by Joanne or obtained from school websites. Secondly, we will summarize Joanne and Teri’s suggestions for the revised survey, and modify further changes to hopefully finalize the survey. Furthermore, we will be emailing all neighbourhood schools that confirmed to participate with the finalized survey along with the filled-out consent form.

WORKS CITED

Glass, I. (2011, Dec 2). Poultry Slam 2011: Act 3: Latin Liver. The American Life. Podcast retrieved from http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/452/poultry-slam-2011?act=3#play