EDITOR Gary Marsden [e-mail]

research has involved working with five undergraduate students as coresearchers. Their familiarity with the local languages and cultural norms meant that they can be invaluable in providing local support. In my opinion, however, their participation should not be restricted to the roles of interpreters and cultural guides. Rather, by investing the time and energy to mentor them in skills related to conducting user studies, we can develop their capabilities to undertake greater responsibilities as research assistants.

When recruiting local undergraduates, the first criterion to consider is their level of commitment to community service or rural development. More important, some universities encourage or make community service a mandatory requirement for graduation. As such, it becomes imperative to learn what a candidate’s responsibilities and contributions in earlier community service projects were, in addition to simply looking for evidence of prior volunteer experience. For instance, several of the local undergrads who work with me have described how they lived for weeks under austere conditions in villages when they were administering baseline surveys for NGOs.

Next, while traits such as technical competence and academic achievement are no doubt important, the ability to engage end users, stakeholders, and

 

 The village district that was shunned by villagers from the upper castes because it was inhabited by the untouchables caste. We established stronger rapport with the latter group for our user study through willingness to visit their district.