During my first semester at Emory, I attended several brief presentations by second year students who had just returned from their summer practicum work. Literally every presentation began with, "Well, I was going to... But then this happened so I ended up..." Therefore, I should have come to El Paso with the expectation that things would not work out as planned. And I guess I've known that in research it's best to expect the unexpected, but that doesn't necessarily make it any easier to deal with bumps along the way.
Anyway, it turns out that I don't have the proper clearance that everyone (except for one compliance lady) thought I had in order to be at one of the hospitals here in El Paso. The problem is that I've already done 3 observations and interviews at said hospital. So now I'm "on hold" with them, meaning that I'll have to do the second (aka postpartum) interview with those 3 women somewhere other than the hospital. That's fine, and I honestly only wanted maybe 2 more women from this particular hospital, but now I need to make sure that all my new paperwork and such goes through soon because it could be problematic if I try to publish my findings next year.
For those of you who have been following my blog, this is a different hospital than the one that was giving me IRB trouble a few weeks ago; ironically enough, that hospital has me cleared for everything now, but none of my enrolled women are planning to deliver there. I think the most frustrating part about this is that I sort of called attention to my study by attending a childbirth class at this particular hospital last Monday. The class instructor emailed someone to make sure it was okay that I attended the entire course during the month of June, and before I knew it I was getting crazy phone calls and emails from lots of people. Maybe it's good that we figured this out now though, since it would have been an absolute disaster if we discovered after I left here that I was never authorized to do the study at that hospital. I just hate that it's causing so many people so much frustration, and I really hope that none of the people from the institution who told me that I was all clear get in trouble.
In the meantime, I'm a little frustrated with the resident I'm supposed to be working with in Juárez. One of the women I interviewed last Friday was due on May 21, and I emailed the resident on Tuesday to find out if she had delivered yet. (Thank goodness HIPAA doesn't exist in Mexico yet...) I still haven't gotten a response, so I still don't know how we're going to keep track of when women deliver at the hospitals across the border.
Actually, I still don't know how we're going to keep track of when women deliver at all. My method on the US-side has been to text the women periodically to see how things are going. Even still, the first woman in El Paso delivered on Thursday night and I didn't find out until Tuesday morning...and I can't interview her until sometime next week because now she's at home and really sore/exhausted. Originally, since I was going to interview the women postpartum while they were still in the hospital, it made sense to try to interview the delivering obstetricians then. Now I'm not quite sure how that very brief (I only asked the OBs for 5 minutes in the consent form) interview is going to fit in, as they'll probably forget the particular women by the time I can meet up with them.
Additionally, I've been working with some giant data sets that are giving me problems. Thankfully, Hillary (everyone's favorite SAS instructor) helped me figure out how to convert the Mexican birth certificate data from characters to numbers. I love people who go above and beyond to help me- it took us a series of 12 emails over 6 days to figure everything out, but it finally worked. It just took forever to run my code since there were over 2.3 million entries (and something like 60 variables). Now I have that data set cleaned and ready, but today Jill gave me another data set from the state of Texas that she wants some help with. It's in a .BH file (which apparently stands for "black hole") and I spent almost two hours trying to open the data. Needless to say, it didn't work, so now we're waiting to hear back from people in Houston about what to do (any advice would be greatly appreciated!)
While this stuff has been going on, I've been spending the vast majority of my time transcribing the interviews that I did on Friday in Juárez. As I expected, it's time consuming and frustrating. The women I interviewed all tended to mumble, and I'm not comfortable enough with Juarense Spanish to catch everything verbatim. I've been listening to the recordings on 40% speed and repeating sections over and over, but it's still super challenging. The interviews were all about 10 minutes shorter than the ones in English, yet have taken me about an hour longer each to transcribe. However, it makes me grateful that I'm the person transcribing in a way, since I feel like when the women mumble and trail off at the end of their sentences a transcription company would probably just notate that it was inaudible or something. And I've noticed that it's those sentences that are richest in terms of the data I'm collecting.
Sorry that this was such a long rant. To be honest, I really do like what I'm doing and feel like I'm exactly where I need to be right now. I feel quite willing to work through and overcome the challenges...I just needed to share my frustrations today.
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