With less than one week left of my first summer as a Laidlaw Scholar, it's time to reflect on Week 5 of my experience thus far. Here are a few milestones I have made since my last update in Week 4, and responses to some reflection questions:
- I finished reading and coding all 113 Detainee Death Reports (DDRs), paying extra careful attention to the gaps in knowledge that can be gained from some of the less detailed reports. It was difficult not to want to use other sources to gather information on decedents that might have been missing in their DDR from news articles or publications, but I made sure to stay focused on characterizing the data available.
- I cleaned through my open-field variables and utilized the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) from the WHO to categorize clinical variables like symptoms, decedent cause of death, and other factors contributing to the decedent's poor health outcomes while in detention. After creating binary variables for the "Red-Flag" symptoms I identified among others, my final dataset came out to a little over 11,000 cells in my CSV file.
- I completed a descriptive statistics table across 84 variables of interest to answer the descriptive/characterization questions of my project. That being said, I have completed Phase 1 of my research and am now in the process of developing my final report.
1. What new ideas, challenges, or other issues have you encountered with regard to your project (this might include data collection, information that contradicts your assumptions or the assertions of others, materials that have enriched your understanding of the topic or led you to change your project, etc.)?
I have realized time and time again throughout my research process that it is not possible to answer every single question in full in just six weeks. I found difficulty in choosing which variables of interest to tease apart, which ones to leave alone, and which variables may not be telling the whole story at the same time. My project's focus on the telling a holistic, life-course story for the decedents in ICE detention has made it personally challenging to "leave behind" some questions I have about specific themes or trends I have identified just in this first phase of data collection that took the entire summer so far. Having spent so much time reading literature in public health research methods, qualitative/mixed methods analysis, and meeting with clinicians and authors in the field has given me so much to work with moving forward. I have realized that the work I have done thus far is just the beginning and I cannot wait to spend more time diving into the intersecting features of some of these social and structural determinants of health I have characterized already.
2. How have these ideas or challenges shaped the bigger picture of your research? Has the scope or focus of your topic changed since you began this project? If so, how?
The scope and focus of my topic has not changed since I began the project --- I came into this research expecting to continue it following the end of the program because I led it with the idea that I will go where the data leads me. As such, I am excited to build out sub-projects from the data I have collected already.
3. Now that youâve engaged in Part II of the Leadership Retreat, reflect on a learning point that remains with you as a new way to understand leadership, and to incorporate into your own engagement, in the future.
A learning point from Part II of our Leadership Retreat has to be that multifaceted leadership dynamics exist not solely in groups, but within an individual level. As I continue my work in leadership, community engagement, and research as advocacy, I will be sure to engage with each approach of leadership regardless of how many individuals I may be working with at a given time.Â