As mentioned in the overview of our final project on Zika Virus in Nicaragua, we have three steps to our project:
- Compile research and information to bring to Nicaragua
- Administer surveys and collect/analyze data
- Ethnographic interviewing to explore areas of interest in survey data
The deliverables featured below are documents that the group has created to accomplish steps one and two in our project and their individual functions will be explained along with the images themselves.
This infographic is an encompassing document of all of our research and information on Zika Virus in general and how it is affecting Nicaragua. This corresponds with our step one because it is a full compilation of our research. We intend to print it out as a poster to be used as an informative tool that can be reused by clinicians. We think that the infographic format is helpful because even if patients can’t read or understand the English the images clearly explain a lot of the content and will hopefully make the information more memorable.
This handout, which we have also translated into Spanish, will be a more concise version of the above infographic. This also corresponds with step one but will serve a different purpose than the infographic. We intend to print out many copies of the handout so that it is easily distributed to clinicians and patients. We decided to translate this into Spanish as well because, if the patients who we interact with are literate, it is much more likely that they know and understand Spanish so we wanted to make this handout as useful as possible. We downsized the amount of information and prioritized topics like symptoms and ways to avoid transmission to make it directly relevant to people at risk of Zika.
This survey is the first part of step 2. The majority of our clinical time will be spent in the clinic in Hormiguero so we created this survey as an organized way to gather general data about patients’ knowledge of Zika and their attitudes towards it. While it may be easier to have people fill it out on their own, we knew that many of the patients would likely be illiterate but we decided to make surveys anyways so that we could have a sort of “formula” to collect qualitative data about Zika in the community. Having this uniformity in our initial conversations will help us identity trends and gaps in knowledge to further explore in ethnographic interviewing.
Because the Hormiguero Clinic is so close to a Casa Materna, we knew that we had to take advantage of this opportunity. This survey for patients of the Casa Materna is the second deliverable of our step two. Although not much is known about Zika, we know that it appears to be most threatening in pregnant women because of the risk of microcephaly in infants. As a group we were also generally interested in women’s health and sexual health in Nicaragua so we definitely wanted to get an opportunity to talk to women at the Casa Materna. This survey contains some questions in common with the general survey about Zika Virus but also delves further into attitudes and experiences regarding women’s health which could give us more nuanced information for our ethnographic interviewing.