With only a month left in Peru, I find myself as busy as ever. Additionally, since the World Cup has ended, I have been doing a lot more of this:
Office Work
And a lot less of this:
Dancing with an American Flag
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been writing a Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices (KAP) survey in relation to tuberculosis. Our theory is that even people with tuberculosis do not know a lot about the disease. A lack of knowledge can lead people to not take care of themselves in the way that they should, to abandon treatment, or–perhaps the most common–stigmatization of the disease. These survey tries to address these themes with mostly quantitative and little bit of qualitative questions . A question may read “How is TB transmitted to other people?” And you’ll get a lot of wrong answers such as “using the same plates” or “by blood” or “by kissing.” In fact, the only way TB is transmitted is through air.
Okay, so you have the survey. What then?
The point of the survey is not to stroke our own egos and prove the theory correct (As I feel a lot of academic research does). But rather to do two things: to show the Peruvian government that “hey, there should be a little more focus on educating TB-affected people during treatment” and to provide a baseline measurement for any education intervention that would follow. Too many poverty-fighting projects start without a baseline to work with and really, without accountability if the project does fail. Thus, it is hard to say whether the project was successful, whether it should be repeated, and how to fine-tweak it. Those are things we’d like to be able to do. J-PAL is an exemplary organization that demonstrates how to carry out programs to fight poverty with measurable and accountable results.
So with the survey-development work almost finished, I’ll be off to the field for the next few weeks: knocking on doors, talking to TB-affected families, crunching numbers, and squeezing my tall frame into lots of these:
Mototaxi used to get around Pisco
