We had the final meeting before the spring break (i.e. the trip to Grenada) on Wednesday. Prior to the meeting, each policy group had been assigned to submit a preliminary analysis paper. The Wednesday meeting was not only for the guidance of the trip but also feedbacks to the paper. The main focuses of the paper were a kind of political environment analysis (power center analysis) and a series of questions that we want to explore during the trip.
Our trip aims at find these missing piece to complement and evaluate (prove or reject) our hypothesis through a series of interviews of various stakeholders. Thanks to the Internet and multilateral cooperations across the region, we had tremendous amounts of information on each of policy issues in Grenada. These articles helped us to assess issues that we would like to focus on in each of policy group. Doing survey was a tough job; we did have lots of information to write down a series of policy recommendations. Meanwhile, there were lots of missing peace, that we could not find. There might be a kind of "trend" among the Government, International Governmental Organizations and Non-profit organizations; articles focused on similar phenomena or aspect. Moreover, limited data availability in Grenada makes quantitative analyses absolutely difficult. After Hurricane Ivan and Emily, the Government, working with some of the International Governmental Organizations, conducted collecting data to do some preliminary analysis based on number. It was still difficult to run a study based on a time series data-set to identify impacts.
So, you should be aware that to find out people who are generous and willing to meet us + make sure that we are in the meeting place on time. That would be another dimension of the difficulty of a student-run study trip.
We would also like to express our sincere appreciation to those who has generously accepted our requests of meetings and helped us to find other officials in Grenada, who would give us very valuable insights for our research.
Thank you very much!!
