Unlike many of my peers, I spent very little of this past week venturing into the forest. With a background in political science and statistics, genuine scientific field research was a daunting task I knew very little about. Rather, I have always been more appreciative of the social sciences, which is part of the reason I opted for a survey-based method for my project. I am so thankful that I did, because I have never experienced such a unique opportunity to visit a foreign town which did not fall under the category of “tourist trap,” or speak to so many locals. Tuesday morning granted me this beautiful opportunity and I cherished every moment of it, even if it did not go exactly as planned. In all my previous survey-based research, I had always simply distributed a survey link online. Posted it on Instagram. Texted it to friends and family and asked them to do the same. This week, for the first time in my life, I found myself facing the absolutely mortifying task of walking up to people with an ipad and asking them to take a survey. Doing this in town, while people were just going about their days, minding their own business, felt disruptive and intrusive. Each time we began to approach someone, we found ourselves immediately turning around and heading in the complete opposite direction. Even though we did not get the response rates we were hoping for on our survey in town, we took this experience with us and carried the lessons it taught us through the rest of the week and will continue to do so through the rest of our data collection.
The second half of the week yielded far more successful results in terms of our survey. Tuesday we were able to go around some of the tables during lunch and get some people to fill it out. Wednesday we posted the survey online and got a bunch of responses that way. Thursday we enlisted the help of Kenneth, who took it upon himself to start lining up staff members in the offices in reception to take our survey. Using these tactics helped us feel more comfortable with approaching possible respondents than walking up to random strangers going about their days in town.
Coinciding with our data collection, we began some data analysis on the previously available data to determine the significance of several correlations and be prepared to compare that to the results we obtained regarding people’s perceptions from our survey. It was in this area where my geekiness truly came out. Coming into this class, I was worried I would be lightyears behind, considering I had no previous background in environmental science or biology or anything related to global and planetary health. Having conducted several research projects in the past, I knew that my background in statistics would be beneficial during this class, but I did not realize how much I would be relying on it until the first day of class. It makes sense that statistics would be an important part of scientific research, as it is the only possible way to determine if the results you get actually mean anything, or if they could simply be some sort of fluke. But with each day of classes and research presentations from Dr. Wasserman, Eric, and even Mecca, I was continually reminded of the importance of statistics. The importance of this really hit me during Eric’s presentation and while reading his article especially. Even as a statistics major, I had always glossed over the portions explaining the stats methods used in most studies I had read for classes. As I was reading Eric’s paper, however, and listening to his presentation, I was reminded of the significance of this seemingly small part of any research project. This made me even more excited for the days to come in which I knew I would be able put my statistics knowledge to use.
Over the course of the week, I spent hours in the library pouring over data of previous snakebite cases, dengue cases, temperatures and precipitation levels on the days, weeks, and months of all the cases, and regions and types of land where the cases were found. I took all of this data and compiled it into one master spreadsheet, from which I began my t-tests. Using a Pearson’s correlation coefficient, I determined the degree of correlation for all of the data points. Then, I used a t-test to determine if any of those correlations were statistically significant. I was the nerd all week sitting in the cafeteria at mealtimes with my laptop analyzing data and multitasking between conversations and data analysis and still just absolutely in my element.
While I will admit that, by the end of the week, I had gone down more rabbit holes with data collection and analysis than I can count and I am sure Biz is thoroughly ready for us to move onto the next stage of our project, I feel like I learned a lot this week about statistics applications in the real world that I will hopefully be able to carry with me throughout further research and studies. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunities this experience has given me, not only socially and culturally, but academically as well and I cannot wait for the rest of our survey responses to come in so that I can get back to analysis.
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