Summer is coming to an end

I am entering the last two weeks of data collection with my field assistants (although the data season will extend into November for me). I am excited because that means that data collection is coming to an end but it also seems like the summer went by so fast and there is still so much work to do.

Today I got to survey an organization that manages a rooftop garden and two collective gardens on the ground, and one of my assistant finished our last community garden to attain our 10 borough goal. It is great to meet one’s sampling objectives (although we are still waiting on 1 survey in 1 borough as we only got 2 survey’s in one of the garden’s last week so I guess I can’t say the objective is 100% met just yet).

We have also been going over all of our surveys again to make sure there was no missing information. If there are any gaps or uncertainty with certain pieces of information the goal this week is to recontact those people. As one might expect, the surveys that were done earlier in the season seem to need a little more clarification.  I must say that my mini data processing activity a few weeks ago really forced me to look at every question for every survey in a different format (excel and equations instead of paper copies and online forms), making oversights or gaps evident and subsequently motivated me to do a second full check of the entries, even after we did a check right after I started processing.

We have also gone through the full list of stakeholders to see if we can recontact any of them who haven’t yet responded and try and get the survey’s done while I still have help. This means calling people that I called or emailed in the past and who didn’t respond, while I will wait to contact those who did respond in some way but haven’t filled the survey out yet (I know that for some it just makes sense to wait for the fall).