In any project, roadblocks will naturally occur. We had no shortage of hiccups this semester as we worked on the music education project.
Creating a Research Plan
At the beginning of the semester, we were given the proposal for our project. Our community partner had one end goal, to have us do research that could help them create a strings education program. This was a very open-ended request, so we spent hours working as a team to narrow it down and figure out our research questions and research plan. When we went to open this document in class, we discovered that it had been corrupted, and none of us, nor the faculty and IT staff that we asked for assistance, were able to restore it, leaving us with no research plan. At our next team meeting, we focused solely on recreating the document that had been deleted. We bounced ideas off of each other until we had nearly mirrored what we had before but felt even cleaner and more developed. Though this caused significant stress at the start of the semester, it was our first time working as a team to address a problem, and it was extremely successful in the end.
Scheduling
Given that we are all college students, people were frequently getting sick. There were sometimes transportation issues such as bus delays and even a stolen car! There were also times when people had scheduled conflicts such as trips, appointments, and work. This meant that we rarely had all seven of our group members together at a meeting. In addition to that, even when we were all able to be in one place, there were frequent technical issues, including three of our group member’s computers being broken in the span of a week. All of these things made it harder to work as a group and complete our project, but we pushed through and adapted as necessary.
We submitted our Institutional Review Board (IRB) application later than we had planned. It was initially denied because we had not explained our plans in enough depth to prove that we would not be putting anyone at risk. We then spent the next class working to fix all of the comments that the reviewer had given us, and the application was then approved. However, because the participants in our research are immigrants, many of whom speak limited English, we knew it was important to have any written communication with our participants translated as well. We have group members who speak Spanish and French, so they translated the surveys and we resubmitted the IRB application. The IRB application was approved and we delivered the surveys to Jubilee House. We then learned that Jubilee House would be closed the following week for spring break, meaning we could not collect surveys during that time or schedule interviews, which pushed our data collection time frame right up to the end of the semester. This limited our ability to schedule interviews, but we reworked our survey pickup plans in order to keep our survey numbers on track.
Language Barrier
Because the population we were researching is immigrants, most of whom spoke limited English, we had to face the challenge of a language barrier. Our community partner gave us a list of languages that are spoken at Jubilee House, and two of the most common languages are spoken by some of our group members. These group members translated the written materials, and we resubmitted our IRB application with these documents included. Unfortunately, given the time and resources we have for this project, we were not able to translate them into additional languages, which limited the response group to speakers of English, Spanish, and French. Our interviews were also limited to speakers of English and Spanish, as the person who did interviews speaks English and some Spanish. We told interviewees that they could respond in whatever language they felt most comfortable, but most of them wanted to speak to us in English, which limited how much they could elaborate on their answers since many of them are currently learning English.