Online Program

Beyond Consulting: Training to Become an Interdisciplinary Statistical Collaborator (302612)

Keywords: Statistical Collaboration, Surveys, International Consulting

For a graduate student, the experience of managing and processing data collection while in the field is invaluable. My poster will cover the challenges encountered and lessons learned while working on-site for a follow-up observational study in Mozambique. The study seeks to understand the socioeconomic impacts of drilling water wells throughout Mozambican villages. Part of the implementation of this survey involves having a statistician personally train enumerators and clean data while in the field. These measures are in place in order to yield a more reliable dataset. Embedding a graduate student in the field provides the ultimate chance for statistical collaboration, as we face the additional challenges of language and culture barriers. The goal of such international collaboration is to eventually build statistical capacities in developing nations.

Marcos Carzolio, statistics PhD student at Virginia Tech, has worked remotely as a statistical consultant ensuring the data quality of a household survey in Maputo, Mozambique. He will speak about his work as an on-the-ground statistician developing protocols for collecting high quality data in a similar, but unrelated household survey to measure the impact of a rural water supply project in northern Mozambique.