Research Assistants

I went to a little informal gathering for anthropology faculty and students at AUCA yesterday. I got the chance to tell the students about my research, and a few of them showed interest in helping me with it. I'm trying to figure out just how to manage research assistants: how many I need, how much I should pay them, what jobs I should have them do. Basically, my study has three phases, all with different jobs.

First, I’m trying to get a general picture of what I’m looking at. I need to find out some basic ways that people categorize aspects of their lives, their relationships, and their country. This is the easiest part of the research. I can find out how people categorize things through list tasks. List tasks ask people to list all the different kinds of a certain thing they can think of, like all the things they worry about on a regular basis, all the people who influence the running of their country, or all the different groups that people can belong to. This is a quick way to lessen the chance that I am missing any really important ideas. However, all this gives me is a lot of pieces to the puzzle. It does not tell me how the pieces fit together.

Second, I put the pieces together. I need to find out how people’s everyday concerns relates to their group relationships. What does a person’s religion have to do with the way they act on a regular basis? When is ethnicity important and when is it not? Are there times when gender differences affect a person’s actions or thoughts more than other times? I answer these questions by asking people about them. I interview people. I ask them to tell me how to put the puzzle together. I also try to find ways to participate with people in events that relate to my research topics. If someone goes to a meeting associated with religion that he or she feels is very important, then I want to go to the meeting as well. If someone works on a newspaper or a committee that tries to effect changes in the country, then I would like to go to work with them and help them. This helps me put myself in their place and put some of the puzzle pieces together myself. This helps me decide what the puzzle looks like. This does not tell me if I put it together right.

Third, I compare a lot of people’s ideas about the puzzle to see how they compare to my idea. Do people put the puzzle together differently in different parts of the country? Do people with different religious opinions put the pieces together differently? What about people of different economic conditions? I do this part through statistics. I take all of the things from the first and second phases of research that I think are important parts of the puzzle, and I condense them into separate survey questions that people can agree or disagree with. I then give that survey to a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds with a lot of different opinions. By comparing their answers, I can see what ideas people agree on, what they disagree on, and what parts don’t really fit into the puzzle after all.

For the first phase, I don't really need any help, but it wouldn't hurt to have some. I'm distributing the free lists to AUCA students on Friday. I'm hoping a couple of the students who wanted to help me will be able to help distribute and then collect the lists.

I need help for the second phase, but it's all behind-the-scenes work. I basically need people to find contacts for me so I can interview them. Students know a lot of people, but I think they might not feel like being appointment setters for me is really worth their time.

I really need help for the third phase. I need students who are willing to travel to the different provinces of the country to distribute surveys. This will take a lot of work, and a fair amount of time. I'm very willing to pay them for this part. Now I just have to figure out what the going rate for research assistants is, and from that decide how many I can hire. I would love to be able to hire 15 or so students, because that would give them jobs and get my research done really quickly. I might only have the funds to hire seven or so.