SWITCHED N SURVEYS
Household surveys, once a mostly low-tech activity, are becoming increasingly digital—with benefits for the quality and timeliness of IFPRI’s research results.
Marcia MacNeil T
he digital divide can work in unexpected ways. When developing-country farmers want instant information
on, for example, prices or weather, they increasingly turn to 21st-century technologies such as smartphones. When food policy researchers want to find out what crops farmers grow, what children eat, or how much rural households spend, they have typically turned to much older technologies—pen and paper. Now researchers at IFPRI and elsewhere are joining a revolution in data collection: computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI).
Much of IFPRI’s research depends on surveys that uncover facts about the lives of poor households. To conduct these surveys, interviewers have typically gone door to door, asked questions, and written the answers on paper questionnaires. Tat was just the first step in a lengthy process that included collecting the question-
naires, hiring people to input the answers in computers, “cleaning” the data by removing or correcting inaccurate information, and analyzing it using statistics software pro- grams. Months later, researchers had their results.
Tat era is coming to an end. With CAPI, a survey designer writes and programs a questionnaire and loads it onto handheld computer devices such as tablets or netbooks, and the interviewers type respondents’ answers directly into the devices. CAPI eliminates a major step in the data collection process: staff are no longer needed to enter responses from each paper questionnaire into a computer—the information is already there. Tat saves time and money. Plus, survey managers can see the data immediately and make needed changes to questionnaires while the survey is ongoing.
Te result, says Esteban Quiñones, an IFPRI senior research analyst, is “better-quality data collected—and available—much faster.”
Better Input,
Better Output So why didn’t data collectors adopt computer technology long ago? It is only recently, says Quiñones, that computers have become cheap, rugged, and mobile enough for this use and that suitable software has become available. And, he says, “many researchers are risk averse and aren’t willing to try something like this until the kinks have been worked out and the benefits have been demonstrated.”
And the benefits are many. Electronic questionnaires can capture more complex and detailed information, allowing for multiple versions of the questionnaire and customized questions that evolve as the interview proceeds. Survey designers can include photos and videos in the question- naire to capture richer information. Supervisors can track the location of interviewers.
A number of IFPRI researchers—including Quiñones and fellow researchers Jef Leroy, Deanna Olney, and Susan Rich-
© 2012 V. Agreda/IFPRI 12
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