Gah! Can't anyone think around here?

I just need an audience that won’t judge me for my outright bitchiness. 

So these grad students! They made up this survey for the community. It is 20 questions long and asks really generic questions, to a point where it is not actually useful. I think between being inexperienced, is part of their flaw, but it is also the construction of the research project.

Here is the dumbest part. Their projects are set up to start with the community proposal on what we wanted researched. That’s good. But then they spent the last semester deciding what data to use – that is great except they didn’t do the literature review first to know what kind of data to look at.  So, now, in this survey, because they don’t understand how poverty actually shows itself, they pulled a bunch of stuff that is limited. For example, they look at income and consumption utility shut offs -  which is great at measuring trends, but because they got caught up in the past data when they created their survey, they’ve only identified emergency service providers that treat poverty, and left off service providers that prevent poverty. The goal we gave them is to create a way to measure regularly and predict outcomes based on prevention.

But the way they’ve selected survey participants is opportunistic and because they don’t have a system for deciding who should be a part of a regular survey which means it isn’t replicable. If it isn’t replicable, it isn’t sustainable, and it isn’t useful.

And they need to start next week if they are going to meet their deadlines. Suddenly, I’m the bureaucracy. It feels weird to be on this side of things.

This has me so pissed, off I’m going for a walk.

Maybe once I’ve calmed down I can think of how to logically argue with my boss why we need to slow down and make this a teaching moment for the students.