I’ve always wanted to understand how the world worked, why anything happens the way it does. As I grew up, I realized that nearly everything in the world had a scale attached to it. In order to understand the scale, I had to understand the factors that tipped it one way or the other. I had to understand data in order to understand the world.
My desire to read and analyze data led me down a never-ending road of “how?” and “why?” that never got answered. All of my courses had some sort of relation to data, and yet I was never in a position to work with data in a capacity where I could understand it from a real-world point of view. This lack of hands-on experience led me to apply for the fellow position for the Port of Walla Walla.
As the Economic Impact Research Fellow, my main purpose is to accumulate data from businesses within the Port in order to determine their economic impact. The first step to achieving this was creating a methodology that would efficiently tackle the problem of the lack of data, as I barely had any recent data to analyze. There are tens to hundreds of economic impact studies, many of which I’ve read in order to determine the best course of action for myself. I learned from these studies that analyzing data in this type of study is highly subjective in some ways. I soon realized that it would be up to me to determine the value of the data.
Another key part of the methodology was the way I would accumulate the data I needed. As many other studies have done, I decided to do a survey so that I could obtain as much information as efficiently as possible while not taking away too much time from the tenants I was hoping to gain information from. I ended up spending a lot of time on the survey because, as the main method of data collection, I had to consider a lot of factors. First, I had to consider questions that tenants may feel uncomfortable answering to the point where it was probably best just to leave it off the survey. Another factor I had to consider was the size of the survey because a survey too large would possibly discourage a tenant from answering it at all. Third, I wanted to make the process of answering the survey as simple as possible, which lead the survey from being mainly written, to more of a checklist. This simpler and quicker form of answering a survey would aim to encourage more tenants to be willing to answer it.
I’m thankful for all the professional assistance I have received both from Whitman and from the Port of Walla Walla and with my methodology prepared, I’m excited to continue working on and completing this project next semester.