Dental Internship Stories: Part 11

Today was more of the same, but different at the same time. What? What does that mean? Well, I'm calling more dental offices, but this time the methodology for our research paper has changed. What went wrong with the old methodology, you may ask. I may have discussed this in my previous post on the Dental Internship Stories (but not too sure about it); while researching last time, we found out that Arizona did NOT cover for denture cleaning. That left Vermont as the only state that covered for denture cleaning, and one state out of 50 is too small of a sample size for a research project. That's only 2% of the entire survey size! So we had to think of a new way to go about doing things without changing the main idea of the research paper, and we decided to focus solely on the New England area instead of the entire U.S. We would do 10 dental offices from each of the New England states that didn't cover for denture cleaning and do 50 offices from Vermont to finish off with 100 total offices. Pretty good plan, right?

No matter which way we go, there are always problems. Today, the three of us branched off into our own states, and my state was Rhode Island. Rhode Island is super small, however, which makes finding dental offices that accept Medicaid really hard. Like, I worked for nine hours at the office (not always working throughout those nine hours, but you get the point), and I got like four new offices. Four! It seriously is not fun when you're literally calling dental offices listed on the Rhode Island Medicaid website and then the offices tell you that they don't accept Medicaid. Oh well, nothing's perfect; I'll just have to keep on searching.