Kaity Deaner

            

            

Image: Kaity holding a sign saying "WASH: After animal contact, before eating, after restroom use." These signs will be put up during the Cecil County Fair.

            This week was mainly focused on my research project and preparing for the Cecil County Fair. I spent the earlier part of the week finishing my questionnaire and learning more about the IRB process. In the later part of the week, I spent a good amount of time making supplies for CCF.

Image: Kaity holding a stack of coloring book pages. These will be used during the Children's Day at Cecil County Fair.

As I go through the loops of developing a research project for this internship, I’ve had to utilize critical thinking in several aspects. One area where this skill was essential was in figuring out the topic for my research project. The challenge was to narrow down ideas and decide on a topic that could be done within the 10 weeks of the internship.

For my research project, which aims to investigate the relationship between media consumption and fruit and vegetable intake in adolescents, I started by looking into prior research. Critical thinking played a role as I looked through different research articles to see what gaps needed to be filled, what questionnaires they used, and the overall results they found. One of the major gaps I found was that much of the research done didn’t put much focus on parental behavior. With that, I added parental involvement with food as a variable for the research. 

One major hurdle was figuring out what questionnaires and surveys to use. With the food aspect, I knew that many people would not be interested in taking the time to fill out a 24-hour recall or food frequency questionnaire. I landed on a survey created by the National Cancer Institute. As for media consumption, I created my questionnaire just based on hours people spent on games, apps, etc. Finally, the biggest struggle was finding a survey that could look into parent involvement with food. While I found many that were tested for validity, it was hard trying to find the actual questionnaires themselves. After a bit of searching, I found the Child Feeding Questionnaire.

Overall, this experience has reinforced the importance of critical thinking in managing research projects. In the future, I would likely try to find a more effective way to find questionnaires, such as messaging the researchers themselves.