Jessica Spence: Lights out, anxiety on – flexibility is key in the research process
This piece was written in the fall of 2024 by GRAD 5144 (Communicating Science) graduate Jessica Spence while she was in Ghana for her field work.
The sun had gone down an hour before as I sat in my room reading on my Kindle, a ball of anxiety growing in my chest. I had one more interview that evening. I always got a little anxious before an interview, but waiting all day really made that feeling grow.
The single light bulb hanging from the ceiling that illuminated my room began to flicker.
“It’s fine,” I thought. That sort of thing happened about once a day here in Amankyea, Ghana. No big deal. But then the flickers continued, a tad more frequently than I’d seen before. Suddenly the light bulb went out.
It was pitch black. I looked out my window and saw not a single light on in anyone’s house. The swinging glow of a phone in someone’s hand as they walked by on the nearby path was the only light visible.
My anxiety turned to panic. First, I could not possibly interview a man in a pitch-black conference room. That would be just too strange. And second, a central component of my methods included the participant drawing a picture during the interview. Clearly, that could not be done in the dark.
“Okay, so, this interview will clearly need to be rescheduled,” I told myself. But I had three interviews scheduled for the following day. Three. The next day was a taboo farming day; a cultural rule stipulated that farmers were not allowed to go to their farms. That’s why so many participants agreed to meet with me then – they had the time to give me without it taking away from their livelihoods. I also felt very strongly that rescheduling would be quite rude and inconvenient for the farmers and for the two translators I had arranged to help me the next day.
The bigger problem? My phone was at 55 percent battery life, and that was my primary method for audio recording the interviews. My second phone, containing my Ghanaian Sim Card, was at a meager 16 percent. Even if I turned them off immediately, there was no way they would last all day actively recording lengthy interviews.
Ironically, I had specifically brought a recorder with me to Ghana for this very purpose, but as soon as I went to check it prior to the first interview I saw that the battery was nearly dead. Had I just put a new one in before I left? Yes. Did I have any idea why it was dead now? No. To add insult to injury, the AAA batteries it needed were very difficult to find in Amankyea. Future lesson to self: Bring extra batteries. I was pretty sure I already knew that lesson, but lessons stick better through experience. In any case, I was pretty much stuck with my phone as my recording device for all data collection. I had used my second phone as a back-up recording device for interviews — up until this point — as well.
“What now?”
I racked my brain, trying to think of ways to save my pathetic 55 percent battery life. The handy-dandy power bank I had brought with me on this trip and so many before was not holding a charge, something I had realized the other day when I tried to use it. It had only given my phone about 30 percent battery life before it died, too.
“My computer!” I realized my laptop was about half charged. With my flashlight in hand (at least something I bought for this very situation was working!), I scrambled through my items to find the adapter that allowed my phone to charge from my laptop. As an avid Apple product fan, I found myself suddenly regretting my device preferences: Why did I need to find an adapter to plug one Apple product into the other Apple product? It felt like I struck gold when I pulled the adapter out of my backpack. I plugged it in, and that magical charging noise chimed on my iPhone as the battery icon turned green.
Just as that moment of relief and peace set in, a text from my partner who had arranged the interviews let me know that the gentlemen I was supposed to talk to that evening was happy to reschedule to the next day — turning three interviews in one day to four — but with the rate my phone charged I felt I would be fine. Eventually, I was able to use my laptop to charge my second phone that evening to be my backup recording device during the next day’s data collection.
As I went to bed that evening, it was a little hard to go to sleep. Although my charging phones relieved some anxiety, there was still the stress of not knowing when the “lights out” would end. The last time this had happened to me at this very location, it lasted more than two days. None of my batteries would last that long. It also was a little harder to fall asleep without the fan on, but without that constant noise, I dozed off. The sharp chirps from the family of bats that liked to swirl around my window and the crunching footsteps of anyone outside who walked by the house lulled me to sleep.
At about 3:00 a.m. I woke to the comforting sound of my fan flipping back on and the glow from the outside lights trickling in through my window. I plugged in my computer and quickly went back to sleep.
If there is one thing I know from all my time collecting data — and doing so on the African continent — it's that things never go as you plan. Never once has my methods section from a proposal document looked the same after I collected data. Obviously, being prepared is key for these situations. However, most of my preparations fell through that evening. Everything I had planned to be a backup quickly became a non-option. Although preparation is vital, being flexible and thinking through every possible option solved my problems that night —and are the more valuable skills when research goes awry.
