Hi everyone! I am so excited to continue my work as a research assistant on the working and nursing study with Dr. Johnson. On my last blog post, I wrote about my experience as a research assistant over the summer. To recap, I interviewed women who breastfeed or have breastfed and work part or full time in New Orleans, I coded several articles about breastfeeding, and I transcribed interviews. I really felt as though Dr. Johnson pushed me out of my comfort zone over the summer, and I learned so much from it.
This semester, I will be continuing the above listed tasks. I’m looking forward to interviewing more women and reading thought provoking articles about breastfeeding. It’s really cool to watch our coding sheet grow as we categorize more and more articles, and I’m eager to see what our data analysis will show once we are finished with this stage. Christina and I will also begin working on statistical analysis on this data. In addition to these tasks, we are going to begin coding actual interviews we’ve done with women. This is the task I am most looking forward to because this is when we will (hopefully) start to see real results from all of our work.
Another potential new aspect of my research this semester is attending the breastfeeding task force on Tulane’s campus. This task force looks at how accessible breastfeeding is for Tulane employees. I think this will be a new perspective because we have primarily been looking at breastfeeding patterns in lower income, black women. This task force will focus on Tulane employees, which represents a different population of women, the majority of which are white. It will be interesting to see how diverse groups of people face different obstacles when it comes to effectively breastfeeding. I’m interested to see if the responses of women to our questionnaire differ between the groups.
I’m excited to use the research skills I began developing last semester, as well as learning new skills and gaining new experiences. I said it once and I’ll say it again, breast is best!