New Job

As If I'm not busy enough I decided to go get a second job to help with my schooling bills along with the wedding bills. SO, without further adeu let me introduce you to my new job. My title is "Research Assistant," and I work for the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Washington. This particular study has been going on since 2001 in which the two principal investigators received A HUGE AMOUNT of money from the National Institute of Mental Health, a branch off of NIH, for a longitudinal study looking at depression and conduct disorder in middle schoolers. They are looking at commorbidity issues and now taking it into adulthood. We are now in phase 7 of this and all the middles schoolers are now 12th graders and/or out of school. I go to their house or a place to meet and interview them for 3.5 hours and then someone else at the same time interviews their parents for about 2 hours. It is pretty intense but the people we interview have gotten the hang of it after 7 or so years. They make money so everyone is happy. There are very stringent rules when you are dealing with research and everyone needs to be trained the same way for inter-rater reliability which may or may not affect validity issues. So I've had a few intense training sessions and they will continue until they feel I am ready! Which should be at the start of November! Thank you Jennie for hooking me up with this job!

Now I've done research before in my undergraduate years where I worked with pigeons and then I worked on another research project in which we looked at pro-anorexia websites and categorized what anorexics had commented on, fascinating stuff. However, this time I don't have to enter all the data, we have someone for that to keep it unbiased. I just do the interviews and pass my computer to the other researchers! However, this is also majorly funded at the standards are 100 times more than what I am used to for research. I love it!