Week 1: Let’s Get Down to Business
Arwen H -
Hello again guys! Since I haven’t been working on my research for too long outside of school yet, I thought I would take this week’s post to give you guys more details about the background of my project and my specific research methods (prepare yourselves for a lot of jargon).
The investment I am analyzing is part of the Water-Saving Commodities (WSC) Program which gives monetary grants to producers to help lessen the impact of the ongoing drought. Grants of up to $15 million will be given to each irrigation district that was preliminarily selected to participate due to numerous factors including location, drought frequency, and capacity to make water-saving improvements with the money. A set amount of money was also set aside to support producers in Native American tribes but due to lack of easy access, my research will focus on the 18 preliminarily selected irrigation districts.
As for my method I am doing independent research. Specifically, I will be sending out google forms surveys to each district with questions surrounding how the districts feel about the investment, how districts are planning to distribute the money between farmers, how much money they are giving farmers, and how participating farmers have used the money so far (I am currently collecting contact information and writing the specific questions so more on that next week!). The survey questions will be open-ended to allow for more detailed responses that more accurately reflect the respondents views. This as opposed to close-ended questions also leaves open the possibility for unanticipated responses. I will then analyze the responses for keywords/phrases that appear multiple times and the percentages of each type of response will be compared to determine the average overall response. I will use this to determine whether or not the investment is being used effectively by discerning overall opinions on the investment and the actions being completed. Specifically, the overall response to each question will be compared to conclusions found by pre-existing research. For instance, if the overall response for what methods the farmers are practicing is a method that prior research has found to be ineffective, the investment overall is ineffective.
I will give the districts one week to respond via email and if they don’t respond within the week, I will send a follow up email. If they don’t respond within a week after that, I will call the district office and complete the survey orally (yes, that does mean I will be one of those annoying spam calls we all receive that ask you to fill out a survey; but if need be, I will).
Thank you for sticking with me through all the jargon. Come back again next week where we can analyze the first responses that come through (hopefully)!
See you soon!