For the last two weeks I’ve been working with Both (head of community work) trying to make sense of all the data we’ve collected in our interviews with fishermen. With about 4 months worth of interviews carried out so far, it’s not been as easy as we thought!
First we had to create a spreadsheet to put all our findings in. The survey we use is quite long and has a mixture of multiple choice and open-ended questions, so it took us a while to produce a good spreadsheet that will be easy to analyse the data from later on. We then started entering the results from our interviews. We’ve had a number of helpers and I think so far we’ve entered about 50 surveys, with a lot still to do! We’re still carrying out 4 surveys a week in local fishing communities, so it’s definitely an ongoing process. We’re getting pretty quick at entering the data now that we both know the survey inside out, although trying to figure out peoples handwriting is still proving to be a problem!
We’re also starting to see some trends appearing in the data which is good. I’ve also found reading the fishermen’s answers to the open-ended questions to be interesting, especially our last question which is ‘’if you had the power to change something, what would you chang?’’. We’ve had a huge variety of answers giving us a lot to think about, although making a stand against illegal fishing definitely seems to be the main theme. My personal favourites are ‘’ I would kill all the trawlers, and then go back to sleep.’’ and ‘’I would get rid of the wind.’’.
It’s good feeling to see all the data coming together and we’re now almost at the point where we can start making graphs, drawing conclusions, and writing our report. Watch this space!
Laura
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