My name is Sahejpreet Gill and I am an intern at Cradle 2 Career. This Spring, we started working on the Data Code of Ethics report. This report would contain community input on how data should be presented at Cradle 2 Career. The process started off with a survey that was sent through personal networks of the members of the project, who were students at the University of Minnesota Rochester. The survey contained around 6 topics regarding data presentation, such as labeling, that participants were told to rank in order of importance. From this survey, we also developed questions surrounding the topics to use in interviews. Once the questions were created and checked to ensure they were understandable, the interviews were conducted by using the personal networks of the members of the project and through an engagement activity using one of Cradle 2 Career’s connections. Once these interviews were conducted, the members were then tasked with analyzing the data. The main themes that emerged during the analysis were then used to create the report.  

At the start of the project, we had a very open-ended work plan, as we wanted the project to be more student-led by the University of Minnesota Rochester students. However, since we had already done the Research Code of Ethics, we did have a basic idea of the key steps that we had to include, such as interviews and analysis. One new component that the UMR students brought up was engaging in other networks. This was very different from what was done before, but provided a lot of new insights and beneficial information. It was also a great opportunity for students to be able to engage with youth given the pandemic. Through this engagement event, students would do an activity, such as drawing or playing games, with the youth for around 25 minutes, and for the last 5 minutes, the students would ask one age-adjusted interview question for the youth to answer. For youth in younger grades, the students focused on an activity that included aspects of data, such as creating graphs. Through this experience, we found youth as young as six grade were able to assess graphs for potentially misleading information, such as truncated axes. This information is crucial for the next iterations of the Data Code of Ethics, as it might be beneficial to expand the network to include younger students. In addition, this experience could be used for future students at the University of Minnesota Rochester working with Cradle 2 Career as an opportunity to engage with youth.

Throughout this process, the most exciting part for me was being able to do the interviews, analyze the data, and use that to create a report. This was the most exciting for me because I was able to see directly how the interviews and community engagement were helping in creating Cradle 2 Career’s internal practices regarding data presentation. In addition, at the time I was also taking a class that focused on qualitative research, so it was very exciting to be able to apply what I learned from that course to the project! This specifically came in handy when analyzing the data and summarizing it into the final report. I felt that it came more naturally to me because I had already done it in my qualitative research class!