Week 2 (May 20-26)
Research Experience
On Monday, we began working with our interpreters. Many doctors at the hospital speak some English, but we are hiring interpreters to help us communicate with the nurses, patients, and patient relatives, both for informal conversations and recorded interviews. Jacob's interpreter and my interpreter were both very friendly Tanzanians in their mid-20s. It soon became clear that my interpreter did not in fact speak or understand English, so that was obviously a bit of an issue. In the end, Jacob and I decided to share his interpreter while in Iringa, and plan to use the money saved to hire two good interpreters when we go back to Dar in two weeks. Other than that, my second week of research has gone well! I feel more comfortable at the hospital and with the doctors. I think the field notes I take in the hospital have become more efficient, but I have been falling a little behind in typing them up at home. We wake up at 6am to go to the hospital and usually don't get back until around 3, and between cooking, eating, hanging out, calling friends/family, and going to sleep early, I have trouble finding the time and energy to type up thousands of words a day. It is also difficult to figure out what to include in fieldnotes—both when I take notes at the hospital and when I type them up at home. Should I be including as much information and as many observations as I can? Or should I be sticking to things directly relevant to my specific project/topic? The right thing to do is probably somewhere in the middle, but I am still working on striking that balance.
Findings
This week I worked on finalizing and translating my interview questions, as well as trying to figure out how to implement the freelisting activity (which looks like it might be more complicated that I originally thought). It has been really interesting to think about my questions and the activity from the perspective of the interviewees and to adjust them as I begin to see what works in practice and what doesn't. We conducted three interviews this week: one with a Tanzanian doctor, one with an Italian doctor working at Tosamaganga Hospital, and one with an Italian medical resident who is at Tosamaganga for a month (the hospital has a partnership with an Italian medical NGO). Part of my project is focused on pain assessment, and from these interviews I learned that although people have been trained to use pain scales for assessment, in practice they are much more likely to rely on non-verbal communication from the patients, including mood, facial expressions, and body language/reactions. I look forward to interviewing more Tanzanian doctors and nurses, patients, and relatives at the hospital. All three interviews were in English, as we are still figuring out the interpreter situation, but Swahili interviews should start next week.
