Improvement of Life and Livelihood in General.

¶ … improvement of life and livelihood in general. It has been my interest to delve into research from the first day I got in touch with it. I fondly remember the excitement on the day I saw the data that I had collected turn into results that gave indications on the fact on human behavior. It was those numbers that lead us to understand people around us more and tell us how we can not only help them but also adjust our approach towards them for a peaceful society. Since the manifestation of my first research in real life application, I decided that I wanted to do jobs that extensively involve research works and changing people's lives. Therefore, I applied and got into the Evaluation, Assessment and Data Center (EADC) of the Orange County Department of Education (OCDE) as an intern in order to see how research could help people in real life, not just in laboratory.

EADC is a place that has helped and still helps the government and other clients to collect data and analyze them with an aim of implementation of the results in improving the education environment of children. There were numerous projects including the ongoing research project at EADC on areas such as nutrition and cyber bullying. During my internship, I worked closely with the nutrition project under the guidance of the program manager with my first task being data collection. During execution of this task in the project, I learned that survey tool development was the most important thing when a researcher or research assistant is conducting a research. The reason for this was that nutrition project targeted children of the age bracket from 7-12years old, and the wording of the survey was too complex for young children to understand what the questions required. Therefore, some of the answers were found to be being discrete at the stage of clearing the data. This problem made me aware that when researchers are developing survey tools, it is important to make sure that the survey match with the literacy levels of the participants, especially with young children. If the survey does not match the literacy levels of the participants or respondents, then there must be a guide or assistant onsite to help them understand the requirements of the survey tool, this way the researcher ensures he has accurate data.

After data collection, my second engagement was in data entry. This task was the hardest task I got during my internship, this was due to the fact that I had to look at all the huge amount of data on a computer for 5 hours per day to make sure they were input correctly in the system. In the office, we did data entry in three steps; scanned, verify and export. These three steps were like three security doors for the data to enter into the system correctly. There were three people responsible for each step so the data would be verified three times before it got exported to be analyzed. This was to make sure that the researcher had the correct to analysis coming from an accurate data entered into the system. Although this task was time consuming and tiresome, it was necessary to do pass the data through all these steps. This is how a research department should be like since data is the most important tool to the research. If I was a client of EADC, I would like to see that the result I got was accurate because the researcher put a lot of effort in to ensure its accuracy.