I am
working with Dr. Julia Painter on a study consisting of mother and daughter
dyads and their thoughts on the HPV vaccine. We will conduct these interviews
at the same clinics the School of Nursing uses to do their field work. To
conduct this study, we will meet with mothers and daughters, and ask them a
series of questions regarding how they feel about the HPV vaccine. Every week, in the fall semester, we would
have meetings to discuss how far along we are to actually conducting the study.
During those meeting, Dr. Painter would have mini presentations about other
vaccines just for basic knowledge. She wanted us to be familiar with these
vaccines because we asked question about them in the interviews as well. Myself and the other RA’s assisted with
preparing the documents that had to be sent to the IRB, so we could start our
project. Until we received that notification, Dr. Painter had us practice
interviewing each other, so we could be comfortable when the study began. She
also encouraged us to interview our family and friends so we could have a lot
of practice. While doing this, we saw a lot of question that we had to change
in order for the interview to run smoothly.
This week
is the first week that we actually got to see the sites where we will be
working at. We discovered that since the clinic hours are only 8am-1pm, we
might have trouble with actually getting mothers and daughters because of
school conflict. Luckily, the nursing coordinator saw this issue ahead of us,
and she already had a few ideas as to how we could get still get the
participants.
When I graduate I plan to further my career in
the community through sex education. I feel like this position helps me a lot
because it actually gives me experience with different communities and seeing
what issues they are facing. Even though we haven’t actually started the study,
the preparation has been a lot of fun. I can’t wait to begin, and actually
start gathering the data!
