With October coming to an end, our group has been focused on completing the scientific component for the canning manual.  While reviewing the existing manual, we were surprised to find that most topics had already been covered in great detail, despite being written at a grade six level.  Thus, instead of introducing a new section, we believe that it would be more useful to provide the trainers and/or their trainees with a 2 to 3 paged summary, highlighting the major topics and expanding on the details with scientific principles. This summary is nearly complete and would be sent off before the interviews with the trainers.  Meanwhile, we have finalized the one-on-one interview times with the Fresh Choice Kitchen’s canning trainers. We are looking forward to speaking with the trainers in hopes of addressing the usability of the manual and answering our finalized research questions, which are:

“To what extent does educating people on home preservation contribute to a person’s food literacy (in the aspects of understanding how and where the food is produced)? How would this result in improving food security with regards to personal health?”

We have received plenty of constructive feedback from our community partner on the FAQ and our list of interview questions for the trainers.  While every group member could attest to our efforts in conducting extensive research and generating appropriate responses for the FAQ, we appreciate their feedback and agree there is opportunity for further improvement.  Due to the familiarity and frequent usage of the scholarly language on campus, we acknowledge that it was fairly difficult for us to determine whether the language was at the grade six level. Hence, it is interesting to see which sections we thought were understandable, but were in fact deemed relatively complex for our selected audience. On the other hand, our group was quite disappointed by their response regarding the interview questions. After directly discussing with our community partner, we understand that there was simply a miscommunication between both parties, which was resolved upon direct communication over the phone. Considering the importance of community consultation as emphasized by this week’s e-lecture by Ernesto Sirolli, my group is extremely grateful to Drew for offering to call and resolve the misunderstandings with Fresh Choice Kitchens.  At the end the conversation, we are happy to report that everyone is on the same page.  Our initial interview questions were replaced with a set of new interview questions that were created together with our community partner. There will be two questions dedicated to the usability of the manual and two for our research question.

Since the trainers are from different regions of BC, instead of a focus group discussion (which we have previously planned), we are going to interview the trainers individually via telephone. This will slightly be more time-consuming for us, but  it is beneficial in a way that the participants will not be affected by opinions of others, therefore eliminating the bias effect that a focus group might cause on the participants.

For the remainder of the week, our group will be making our second site visit at the GVFBS, where we will be conducting the one-on-one interviews with the canning trainers on Wednesday and wrap up on Thursday using Skype. The FAQ revision will also be done at that time with our community partner.  Throughout the next two weeks, we will be working on the final report and continue to review scientific journals. Once we have compiled the responses from the interviews, we can incorporate the findings to our final report.  Despite the approaching deadlines, we—as a team—are confident in overcoming any more challenges that may come our way!