Dissemination

I am now in the process of making the rounds, trying to raise awareness about aquaculture workers’ issues in North Carolina (I’m switching to refer to them as aquaculture rather than crab workers because I had the pleasure of interviewing a couple oyster workers in Elizabeth City).

Creating a presentation on my work really forced me to think through my main findings. Of course I’m not going to be able to really do any analysis on the text of the transcripts until next semester when I take an advanced qualitative methods course. But I think it’s been good to try to start wrapping my head around my findings already.

My results fall in to a couple different categories:

– Participant demographics: One of the main questions North Carolina Farmworker Health Program (NCFHP) wanted me to answer was Who are these people? Since so little information existed out there on NC aquaculture workers, step one was getting a kind of demographic sketch up.

– Living and working conditions: Another question NCFHP wanted answered was Where do these people live and what does their life in the US look like? In my project I really didn’t want to approach the interviews with the idea already in my mind that these workers were being mistreated. These workers come to NC year after year and spend long periods of time away from their families because it’s worth it to them. I was more interested in getting their perspective on their lives in the US rather than checking off possible housing violations.

– Health concerns: In order to begin thinking about extending medical services to this population, we have to first know What are the major health problems? I looked at conditions both related and unrelated to their work in the processing plants and I explored with them how they cured and solved their different health problems.

– Barriers to clinical care: Participants walked me through all of their experiences with the NC healthcare system, including times when they had wanted to attempted to get care and could not. From these stories, I was able to tease out the answer to the question What are workers’ main obstacles to accessing clinical care?

I presented to the staff of NCFHP last week and I was overwhelmed with how well it went. The staff members were very interested in engaged, asking tons of questions and we began brainstorming possible reasons why workers didn’t seek care in some situations and solutions. I ended up presenting for more than an hour and got some great feedback on my initial results. Moving forward, I will be presenting to an NC legal aid group and NC Agromedicine Institute in the next couple weeks. I also wrote an article about my work for the NC Agromedicine newsletter and will be meeting with NCFHP staff to speak more in depth about recommendations for their organization based on my results.

Data Collection: DONE!

The day has come. Data collection is done. No more driving 6 hours in one day to the coast and back.

In the past two weeks I went to the coast twice to two different camps, the one in Aurora that I have been visiting and a new one in Elizabeth City, NC. That’s over 700 miles of driving in just a couple days! It was great to visit a new camp and I was surprised by how different the social and work life was.  The Elizabeth City camp was located much closer to a town, they had the chance to go to church, participate in soccer teams and there was a Latino Center close to them that could help them through any problem.  Their employer also provided them much more transportation since the distances were not huge. In contrast, workers in a plant like Aurora, which is much more isolated, have little to no access. I’m excited to start working through the analysis of these themes next semester.

On the other hand, visiting a new plant in Elizabeth City reminded me of how far I’ve come in creating a relationship with the workers in Aurora. In my last trip to Aurora, workers greeted me with hugs, invited me in to their rooms to catch me up on the latest work they’ve been doing and gave me bags of cucumbers to take home. I visited the plant in Elizabeth City with a Latino Outreach worker that is well known in the community, but I did not have the time to introduce myself and sit chatting with them like I could in Aurora. I could tell the difference in the interviews. Participants were not as open with me, they tended to give closed or short responses rather than a narration of their lives and experiences. It showed me how important laying the ground work of relationships is for conducting qualitative interviews.