SEAT-KU this week

I missed to blog about SEAT-KU activities in October. It just shows that we have been so busy working on project activities including staff recruitment, which took a lot of our time. Now it is November. And this week, 1-5 Nov have also been hectic. In fact the week is not finished yet because we are still gonna work  tomorrow, Saturday. And Sunday even if there are still things we need to do. This week the team from U of Stirling and the WP8 Coordinator from U of Bergen are here with us. We are still at the stage of preparing for the baseline survey which should have started on 3rd Nov. However since the survey instruments were not finalised yet, we could not start the survey. The schedule for this week looked like this:

1 Nov - meeting at KU-Fish among UoS (Francis, Lynn, Lynne, Richard), UiB (Matthias) and KU teams regarding latest draft of questionnaire and survey notes, introduction of team members, preparation of picture cards on values and of common tilapia and shrimp diseases in Thailand. Before the European team arrived in the morning, the Thai team had a meeting together with our faculty experts in Social Science, Gender and Economics. The major thing we talked about was the type of pictures to use for the values question. The experts helped a lot in giving inputs and ideas so the staff can work on them as we only had 1 day to prepare. Two staff were assigned to work on them and show the results in the afternoon. Also we discussed about the diseases picture cards. Again another 2 staff were assigned to work on them, summarizing the info and scanning the pictures from posters and books, to be presented in the afternoon.

It was a heavy day of discussions about the survey, questionnaire and codings. The meeting finished late and we still had to rush for the printing of materials. It is good that we know of a big printing shop at Future Park which closes at 9pm. So it was nearly 630 pm when we finally had all the files to be printed - draft 6 of questionnaires and survey notes, and the powerpoint files of the pictures. These materials would be used for the following day's piloting work among tilapia farmers. There were 14 of us for piloting so we made 14 sets of questionnaires and survey notes. For the pictures, 4 sets of coloured pictures were printed to be used by 4 teams. So one can imagine how much paper was used to print them all, and to think they are just drafts. Well as a consolation we can use the back side for another printing. We reached the shop at around 730pm and thankfully we were able to print them all ...

2 Nov - we went to Chachoengsao to pilot test the questionnaire among tilapia farmers. Three farmers were interviewed. One group took a long time to finish and by the time we left the area it was already past 4pm. We arrived back to KU at nearly 7pm.

3 Nov - at the office to discuss piloting results, observations and suggestions to improve the questionnaire and notes. Another long day of meetings. Added more pictures for the production system question. Again we had to wait for the revised survey draft and the production system questions to be finished, and as the other day, rushed down to the mall to print a new set of revised questionnaires and the pictures to be used the following day for piloting of shrimp farms.

4 Nov - we went to Chachoengsao to pilot test the questionnaire among shrimp farmers. Four farmers were interviewed.  This time we were better at time management. We left earlier than the other day and arrived back at KU at around 6pm. Jesper from UCPH and Dr Kulapa from Fac of Econ-KU joined today.

5 Nov - at the office to discuss piloting results and more suggestions to improve the questionnaire and notes, and additional codings. As well, we talked about the Access database which is being developed by UoS team. We will use this to enter all the data collected from the field.

Sample frame, design, sizes and related topics will be discussed tomorrow, Saturday, including the codes/notes and finalisation of questionnaire (hope hope hope!). We hope to be able to finalise this part so we can start to verify our information and know who to interview during the actual surveys. As it stands, our survey schedule has been pushed to 2 weeks later. Maybe more if more things need to be done prior to survey.