Jonathan Schulte is currently half way through his internship with British Red Cross, working on an interesting research project investigating the flood recovery work carried out by them following the Cumbria floods in 2015.
Below is his reflection on the work he has carried out so far, and the nature of his role at the British Red Cross.
“In July 2017, I started my placement with the British Red Cross. My task was to research the flood recovery work carried out by the organisation, following the floods in Cumbria in 2015. In praxis, this meant that I had to fulfill five tasks: Understand what recovery work was done; choose individual elements of the recovery work to ask quantifiable questions about; write a questionnaire to get answers to these questions; and ultimately, analyse the answers and write my insights into a report.
My first task of understanding what work the Red Cross had carried out post-floods threw me in the deep end: On day one, my manger buried me under a landslide of information – figuratively and literally, with hundreds of pages of evaluations, reports and statistics printed, as well as some forty excel spreadsheets outlining the help provided digitally. The next days I spent making sense of the information provided to me. Especially helpful was a meeting I could organise for the third day of my work in Kendal. There, I met one of the workers who coordinated the recovery project across the county. Speaking with him sparked initial ideas of what the flood and its recovery work meant on a personal level, outside of database entries and demographic statistics.
Based off of this newfound understanding, and a briefing with my line-manager, I chose three questions to research in greater detail. Firstly, how did people get into contact with the Red Cross? Secondly, what aid was expected from the Red Cross by the affected? And finally, did the Red Cross work help people recover? To answer these, I decided that a short online and telephone survey would be the best way forwards. Subsequently, I created the survey in survey monkey, gathered email addresses and sent them out. More time consuming was conducting the telephone interviews: Phoning some 150 people over two days, just to get fifteen replies. With this, I had a total of twenty-seven answers collected. While this sample-size was smaller than ideal, it was enough to see some trends emerge.
Now, I am starting the fourth part of my work – to make sense of the data I collected. In one way, this is not too difficult, as many of the general conclusions are self evident; saying that it is best for help to arrive as soon as possible after the floods is not a revolutionary idea. The challenge comes however, in proving this from the data available. In the case of response time, I am lucky enough to have a clear trend in some of the databases, suggesting fewer and fewer people came to the Red Cross as time progressed after the floods. However, with the other two questions, this promises to be a greater challenge. Fortunately, I have a further four weeks to overcome this challenge.”