After passing the dissertation proposal on May 9th, 2008, I started to plan for the trip to China. In my proposal, I planed to conduct part of my research project in China. My goal was to collect high-quality data of at least 30 adults and 70 3- to 6- year-old children in 6 weeks.
For the experimental purpose I need to cooperate with Beijing Normal University and use their equipment and labs there. I contacted professors in Beijing Normal University by email before I arrived in Beijing. They were really nice to help and very interested in my experiment. I arrived in Beijing on May 20th. I went to Beijing Normal University and figured out things were not as smooth as they appeared. To check the equipment out, I need to talk to a lot of people and signed up a lot of forms (especially when I want to move it to a kindergarten it was really troublesome). And because the equipment belongs to the whole department, I need to work with other users of the machine to fix the schedule. Then I planed to start to work in the university on May 28th. I also posted fliers around the campus to get participants.
Unfortunately I got injured on May 28th morning when I walked to Beijing Normal University. It was really severe and I went to the hospital immediately. By breaking my knees and face and mouth, I cannot work and need to stay where I live for a week. I had to cancel all my appointments and I cannot do anything in a week. I restarted my work in Beijing Normal University on June 4th and finished 30 adults in 4 days.
Meanwhile, I had not found a kindergarten where I can conduct my experiment. It was a time when there was the hand-foot-and-mouth disease, a kind of a communicable disease, in preschool kids in Beijing. A lot of kindergartens were closed temporally and most of the open ones refused to let outside people in. I thought of getting parents and children to the university labs to do the experiment and I found that way is really inefficient and almost impossible to finish the 70 kids in a mouth. Eventually there was a kindergarten which were nice enough to let me conduct my experiment there. I started to work in this kindergarten from June 11th. I hired 2 assistant to help me and we spent a week there, collecting data from 81 children. By this time I have finish all my goals of the trip.
After that, I gave a talk about how to use the equipment in Beijing Normal University on June 20th. I also gave a talk in Beijing University about my dissertation project on June 25th. I was also invited by Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou to talk about my dissertation project. I visited them and gave a talk there on June 30th. I left for Beijing on July 2th and returned to U.S on July 4th.
In a word, I accomplished all goals I planed: collecting 30 adult and 81 kid data. These data will complete half of my dissertation (the other half will be completed in the U.S.).
The most difficult problem is the experimental equipment. Finding a kindergarten also took me a lot of time. Also the communication with my assistants was a problem. Because they did not fully understand my experiment purpose, there were some miscommunication that I found part of my data is useless. I need to collect this part of data again which took me some extra time. Another difficulty is the time. I sometimes feel it was too tight especially one week off for the injury. Meanwhile, the traffic in Beijing was so bad that it took 1.5 hours to go to Beijing Normal University and 1.5 hours to go to the kindergarten each day. Also the schedule of children does not allow a lot of time each day to work with them: they go home early and they have meal and sleep times. Finally I overcame all of them and had a productive trip to China.
