In this first blog entry, I just wanted to outline a little bit about our project and where we're at right now. Steven wrote a lot of this to explain our project to our undergraduate researchers.
Our Project:
As mentioned above, the project has two parts: a stakeholder analysis and a health survey of Latino community members. With the stakeholder analysis, we will be interviewing 25 different community organizations who work with our Latino community and will be assessing the services/resources that they provide. We also developed a health survey that we hope to distribute to around 30 Latino community members in Charlottesville this summer. This survey/interview is meant to determine what the perceived health needs are among our Latino community and what may be barriers to accessing care, specifically at UVA. By understanding what resources are available and what the perceived needs may be among the community, we hope to inform future efforts to improve Latino health access and health care.
Timeline:
Spring/May - Melissa and Steven worked on a lot of background research, and talked with a lot of community partners about the reality of health care for Latinos in Charlottesville. We developed two questionnaires: an open-ended, qualitative survey to discuss with community organizations and a quantitative survey to interview Latinos about their experiences of healthcare in Charlottesville. We applied for IRB approval, and have conditional approval pending a Spanish translation of our community member survey and a few small edits to the IRB application.
June - Melissa and Steven are in Guatemala for the month of June and will not be back in the states until July 6th. During this time, undergraduate researchers could help us with background research. This could be done at home, though having access to the databases via UVA libraries would come in handy. We will also be planning and setting up interivews during this time as well. We are working on the IRB edits, Spanish translations, and hiring undergraduate researchers to help with field work.
July - Once we return on July 6th, we will have 3.5 weeks before we start school again. We will fit all of the interviews that need to be carried our during this time. During Week 1, we will carry out about a quarter of the stakeholder interviews and organize the rest of the stakeholder interviews. We will also be connecting with local stores where latino community members frequent to set up community members interviews. For Weeks 2 and 3, we will begin the community member interviews (30) and complete the stakeholder interviews. This will take us to August.
August - In August, Melissa and Steven will begin classes. We will be able to guide the project, but will be significantly busier with classes. During this month, we will begin to analyze some of the data and undergraduate researchers can complete more community interviews. After that, we can assess where we want the project to go.
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