Michael Johnson and Dr. Kirk Hawkins, Political Science
As a research assistant for Professor Kirk Hawkins and a recipient of an ORCA grant, I went to Paraguay for four weeks to investigate two of the government’s poverty relief programs. To do so, we visited randomly selected literacy sites, interviewing each site’s workers and users to determine the degree of partisan criteria for the allocation of jobs and services. The voluntary interviews lasted an average of 12-15 minutes. In addition, I interviewed the national coordinator of education and health in order to contrast their versions of the programs’ goals with our on-site findings. The research project gave me the opportunity to learn how to network, wade through government bureaucracy, and develop my leadership skills.
When Professor Hawkins and I created this project, I did not know with whom I would need to speak to answer the research questions. After some preliminary research in Utah, I was confident that the contacts I had made with government leaders in Paraguay would be sufficient to answer the research questions. However, after arriving in Paraguay I found that some of the people with whom I really needed to speak were not the ones I had contacted via email from BYU. Thus, I was left to use my previously made connections with government leaders and administrators in order to set up interviews with those individuals privy to the information I needed. Through this process I learned that “who you know” does matter, even if they are not the particular person who has all of the answers.
Getting answers from those national level workers was not an easy task in the first place. Often times our contacts would demonstrate indifference (at best) when we solicited their help. In fact, the 3-4 days we had scheduled to be dedicated to national level interviews for the poverty relief programs turned into 14 days. To complicate matters further, one of the poverty relief programs we had hoped to study was no longer functioning. Despite these obstacles, we had a successful interview with the former director of the obsolete program. Furthermore, we maximized our time in the last two weeks of the project by convincing a government worker to take us to each of the 10 random sample sites across the city, expediting the process significantly.
The actual interviews with the poverty relief workers and users were not as challenging as coordinating those meetings. I learned quickly that unless we communicated our purpose clearly to the government workers responsible, we would be unlikely to visit any of the sites, let alone 10 of them. Delegating more of the interviews to my fellow research assistants and taking responsibility for setting up the interviews proved to be the most successful tactic for our particular research group. Working alongside the other research assistants gave me a chance to identify their strengths and allow them to put them to use. I also learned that taking their suggestions and concerns into serious consideration helped to streamline the work and avoid potential pitfalls.
In summary, studying Paraguay’s poverty relief programs made me more aware of some of the more practical aspects of politics and business. Finding the right people sometimes consisted of speaking more Guaraní to certain workers, and more Spanish to others. Wading through bureaucracy proved worthwhile once a government worker agreed to advance our project by offering to take us in his own vehicle. And working collaboratively with the other research assistants produced a superior study to one I could have done on my own. I appreciate the chance I had to create and carry out this research in Paraguay.