Why We Do It: Walking Extra Miles for Mental Health
20 September 2024Deeply Proud, Immenselly Grateful to be Part of this Project
25 September 2024When, on 8th September 2024, I was invited to be part of the Walk347, in collaboration with NAS Magna Carta’s BanStopPrevent Advocacy Project pilot field survey, as a Field Research Coordinator, I least envisaged it to be a project that could assume international dimensions. I started getting curious when six of us were recruited as Field Researchers and remunerated appropriately for the qualitative and quantitative data collection job at three field locations around Ubakala, Umuahia South Local Government Area of Abia State.
My curiosity heightened with the standard of our onboarding program, which encompassed training to the finest details in every aspect of the field survey protocol, including procedures for collection of quality data, mixed sampling and stratification of data, data integrity, data validation, etc. The training was in line with international best practices, ensuring that the exercise was executed professionally.
Right on the field, it was a very intriguing and challenging experience engaging participants to extract and return qualitative and quantitative data in real-time with the use of the KoboToolbox software application. This was my first contact with the KoboToolbox app. Although I had been involved in some field surveys in the past at a Supervisory level, my involvement in the present exercise and doubling as a Coordinator and Interviewer comes with its peculiar challenges and novel experiences, enriched knowledge and value addition. In addition, being an applied scientist, the core of my research had been mainly laboratory-based experiments. However, this current project offered me insights into field data collection and analysis procedures in social science-based research studies.
In the future, I look forward to contributing to achieving the objectives of this project in the long term. Through my small contributions, humanity will be positively impacted, which will ultimately benefit society and mankind.
My sincere gratitude goes to Walk347, in collaboration with NAS Magna Carta, for offering me the opportunity to participate in this project. The experience and knowledge I acquired for my self-development can never be overemphasised.
Together, we make a difference.
Christian Abuajah, PhD
Holds a PhD in Food Chemistry, Biochemistry and Biotechnology and is currently the Field Research Coordinator of the BanStopPrevent Mental Health Advocacy Field Research