Open Your Mind and Ears

This week I helped Tara and Lucia (human geography team) transcribe an hour long interview of a lakefront property owner. Little did I know about the actual difficulty of their job until I realized I spent 10 minutes transcribing just the first minute of the interview. (When people are talking over each other with a strong Midwestern accent, you’re going to have to rewind and replay the section to fully understand what each person is saying). I got mad respect for them, they scheduled/conducted 19 interviews in two weeks and work hard every day to transcribe them.

Tara and Lucia are interviewing lakefront property owners about how they maintain their land and how they acquire information on what they could do to curb phosphorus pollution. Although I transcribed only a small portion of the interview, I listened to it entirely because I became curious about the interviewee’s responses. My project examines whether recreational water users value the lake more/less with better/poorer water quality, so it was interesting to listen more in depth about someone’s perception of and relationship with the lake’s water quality. The lakefront property owners describe their home as a little spot of heaven, having the best accessibility to the lake and constantly surrounded by wildlife. Their family uses the lake to ride their pontoon, fish, and swim, so they really wish that the water could be cleaner during the summer. But even with the algae blooms, they say they still go on pontoon rides and use the lake all summer.

I’ve encountered this same attitude when distributing surveys at boat launches in Chetek and informing people that the water quality is worse than average. People aren’t pleased that the water is green, but they’ve often told me that they’re used to the algae blooms and are still willing to fish or ride their pontoons at the lake. Listening to the interview confirmed my growing suspicion that informing people about poor water quality may not significantly change how much they use the lake. This is a bit concerning for my project because I didn’t expect people to be so ok with spending time at the lake during algae blooms. But hey, nothing in research (and even life) exactly goes the way you want it to.

From transcribing an interview and talking to people when handing out surveys, I realize that I actually enjoy listening to what people have to say. Just like numbers, I can find patterns and disparities that connect and distinguish all the conversations. I used to think numbers trump words, but now I have a newfound appreciation for qualitative data.

I'll end this blog post with a shout-out to Innisfree for teaching me how to use GIS for our policy analysis project! A major perk of working in an interdisciplinary research team is being able to learn from each other’s expertise and perspective. I can easily ask econ professors for help with Stata, R, and SAS. But GIS? Not really.