Thursday, March 24, 2016

FWS Student Highlights: Glenisha Ray

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!