Teach One, See One, Do One
Maggie Shideler (Global and Public Health Sciences, Class of 2024) facilitating activities from the PRYDE Youth Investigators Program during 4-H Career Explorations
Growing up watching medical dramas on TV, I became familiar with the phrase “see one, do one, teach one.” It summarizes the common way that medical professionals master new techniques: first, observe someone else; then, practice it yourself; and finally, teach someone else how to do it to solidify your expertise. Thinking about my time with PRYDE this summer this phrase came to mind, except in my case, the phrase became something more like “teach one, see one, do one.”
Teach One: When I started working with PRYDE, my experience with social science research was very limited. That’s why it came at a great shock to me that the first thing I was asked to help out with was leading the Youth Investigators program. Youth Investigators is a hands-on manualized experience that aims to teach young people about social science research. The curriculum lays a solid foundation of the research process by covering topics such as social science literacy, quantitative and qualitative data analysis, research dissemination, and ethics. Although I felt underqualified, I quickly realized that preparing to teach this curriculum was likely one of the best ways to jumpstart my journey with social science research.
The part of the curriculum that I was the most unfamiliar with was analyzing qualitative data, but this ended up being the area which I grew the most in this summer. In one of the program modules, we have youth participants interview each other about their experiences with sleepovers. Then, we teach them how to use thematic analysis to identify common themes that emerged about the benefits of sleepovers, such as independence from parents or developing closeness with friends. Helping young people struggle through this process was both validating and beneficial for me. Thinking creatively about the different ways to explain the coding process to youth and hearing their interpretations helped me to understand qualitative data analysis on a deeper level. It was also very refreshing to see other young people as excited to learn about the research process as I was.
See One: The next chapter of my journey with qualitative research began on the last day of the Youth Investigators program. Our team was going to use qualitative methods to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. We partnered with members of Cornell’s ACT for Youth team to conduct focus groups with the youth participants. I had just spent the last few days teaching youth about conducting effective interviews, so it was meaningful to watch translational researchers demonstrate the application of interviewing skills through the youth focus groups. From them, I learned the balance between probing your interviewees to help them share specific experiences while also being mindful of sticking to the original goals of the interview. I also began to see the true value of qualitative research methods, which is to allow researchers to obtain a depth of information on participant program experiences that one could not possibly get from complementary quantitative methods.
Do One: After we had collected all our data from the focus groups, it became my turn to use qualitative methods to analyze them. We started by searching for recurring themes from the data collected during the focus groups, such as feedback from youth comparing the curriculum to school and critiques regarding program facilitation. Afterward, we shared our themes and collaborated to condense and refine our codes. Finally, after re-coding the transcripts, we identified the key set of codes that would provide valuable information for future implementations of Youth Investigators.
It was during this process that I learned the nuances of working with qualitative data. You must simultaneously draw meaning from participant responses while taking care to not insert your own bias. Furthermore, you must refine codes to ease the analysis process without having the codes lose specificity. Through qualitative analysis, we were able to obtain a thorough understanding of what youth thought about our program, what we could improve on, and what valuable skills they gained.
Getting to be a part of PRYDE’s work with the Youth Investigators curriculum, from learning it, to teaching it, and to analyzing it, was a significant experience for me. The mission which lies at the heart of Youth Investigators, and within PRYDE in general, is empowering youth by equipping them with research skills to “investigate” the things that they care about. So, although I wasn’t a teen participant of Youth Investigators, I feel that delivering the program as a facilitator and working through the analysis process empowered me with skills to start to make more sense of the world around me and to make a difference with what I discovered.