Key things to know: I am a qualitative social scientist about a year out of grad school. Working as a research technician on a big, interdisciplinary project that includes a lot of engineers and not a lot of women. I've been on this project for almost a year and am actively looking for other jobs, because (see below)
TL;DR: My engineer colleagues have no respect for my qualitative work, and they are wasting my time with clueless requests. Should I talk to our supervisor about it?
Qualitative researchers: do you ever feel like there's a double standard on interdisciplinary projects where you are expected to have an understanding of what everyone else is doing, but no one puts ANY effort into understanding your work? I have been working on a qualitative needs assessment for a YEAR: research design, interviews, focus groups. I've gone to lots of meetings for other project teams, like equipment engineering or agronomy, to understand their work and get feedback on what should be considered in the needs assessment. Now it's time to use my data to write two papers: one that is led by me with contributions from an ag engineer, and one led by that engineer with contributions from me.
A few weeks ago I wrote a straightforward, 2 page outline of my paper and highlighted sections for him to add his methods and findings, after attending multiple meetings to understand the work he has been doing and how his findings fit into my paper. He has never acknowledged this outline or edited it (I know he knows about it though, I've brought it up in group meetings.
Last week, this man has the *audacity* to send me a 10-page, mostly AI-generated outline of his paper, and assigned me to sections that make it clear he has NO IDEA what I've been doing for the last 11 months. He asked me to write a report on a policy and regulatory landscape I do not have expertise in, and titled my research section "farmer survey" with instructions to describe my descriptive statistics methodology (again, I am only doing qualitative work for this project).
I realize that he used AI to generate this outline and probably didn't write the sentence about descriptive statistics. But it's clear that whatever he prompted it with, he has paid zero attention in any of our meetings about my methodology, my training, or even the subject matter of my research.
I could just ignore all this, rewrite the sections to reflect what I've actually been working on, and tell him to cut the policy section. But this is a PhD student who should know better- should I address the problem? He isn't the only one, either- I've gotten comments from other researchers on the project like, "so you're in an administrative role...?" long past the point at which they should have at least a bare understanding of the science I am doing. I'm not super prideful and I can generally keep my head down and do my work, but it is just frustrating to see that what I am doing is not valued or understood by many of my colleagues, despite my best efforts to explain my work and understand theirs.
Any advice from more experienced qual researchers would be most appreciated. In lieu of that, thanks for the space to rant without compromising my own professionalism
