Town Hall #4 Report: Research in Semi Urban / Rural Settings
The ResearchOps community organises remote town hall sessions to explore different perspectives of #ResearchOps. For the 4th edition, we had the pleasure of welcoming Arnab Pal from Clinton Health Access Initiative.
Drawing on lessons from a recent study undertaken in rural Punjab with Hepatitis C patients, Arnab presented the challenges of organising and conducting research along with the iterative models used to stay nimble and agile during the exploratory and deep-dive phases in sensitive zones.
Brilliantly hosted by Chris Adams and Nishita Gill.
Key segments:
- 00:04:00- Arnab and Nishita’s talk
- 00:35:45- Q&A session
- 00:43:45- Updates from ReOps, including a sneak peek at the upcoming Researcher Skills Framework workshops, our next community project 🚀
- 00:50:00- Q&A session, continued
And here’s the link to the slide deck.
Summary
Context: This talk is based on a project from Arnab’s previous employer, a pharmaceutical company that launched a product that cures Hepatitis C. Its uptake wasn’t as successful as expected, and the company — with the help of Nishita’s company — set out to understand what was going on in the province of Punjab, which has a particular high infection rate.
It’s not often that research is easy. And running studies in small towns and villages comes with its own set of constraints — and with it, a new set of considerations for research operations.
In their talk, Arnab and Nishita dive into the three phases of research, introducing the challenges they faced and how they overcame them.
Project planning
Most recruitment agencies don’t have the network to identify potential interviewees from rural areas. The project team were dependent on their own contacts, and leveraged sales teams to contact doctors or hospitals to eventually reach patients. This approach introduced scheduling dependencies, difficulty in screening interviewees and selection bias. In addition, the presence of sales staff occasionally affected the quality of responses.
In retrospective though, this approach gave initial access to an unfamiliar space and functioned as an effective sense-making activity to get a high-level understanding of the landscape and dynamics at play.
Field work
Indeed, by the time it came to collect data from the field, the team had identified alternate networks that could help them access target communities. For example, there are brokers operating in local markets or entrepreneurs providing water supply services who are deeply embedded in the daily life of these communities.
These connections enabled a larger pool of respondents, better sampling and no interference in the interview process. The downside, which will always be true when needing to piggyback on other parties for a way in, was that it still took time. Identifying and cultivating relationships with new alternate networks takes a lot of work, and a certain number of unproductive interviews with out-of-scope participants is to be expected.
Informed consent and ethics in this context are much more delicate and important, as participants agree to be interviewed because of their trust in the person who accompanied the researchers. Gentler and higher-level conversations were had, respecting the boundaries of access. Other considerations include navigating power dynamics, losses in translation, how to compensate interviewees, and how much photography is acceptable.
But let it be known — these were incredibly enriching experiences for the researchers. Rural life has a slower pace and hospitality that brought them an insiders’ perspective into the lives and belief systems of people they interviewed.
Synthesis
In spending long stretches of time on the field with 8–10 hours of interviews per day, the most difficult task of research got even more difficult. The researchers devised creative ways to capture and synthesize data, making sure to capture key observation on a daily basis and running synthesis sessions on a weekly basis. Each session guided the research plan for the next few days.
A big, big thanks to Arnab and Nishita for sharing their hard-earned lessons with the community, and to Chris for organizing this town hall.
I found myself marveling at the worlds that our work in research can occasionally take us, and at the same time, bowled over by the operational and project management challenges of this study…!
The next town hall will be announced soon. In the meantime, keep on exploring #ResearchOps here:
- Watch previous townhalls on the ResearchOps Vimeo channel
- Follow us on Twitter @TeamReOps
- Subscribe to our Medium publication
- Sign up to join the ResearchOps Slack community
Thanks for reading!
