Yesterday, we published a new blog post about Khulisa’s recent experience conducting a huge health survey of 7,500 households in Zambia. Conducting an in-person survey of this scale, in the privacy of respondents’ homes – rather than at service delivery points, where the majority of our in-person surveys take place – taught us a number of valuable lessons. The first lesson was how important it is to recruit and train great field workers and properly supervise those workers during data collection.
Our team was in the field for eight weeks during this household survey, with workers sprawled across the country’s hard-to-reach areas armed with tents, generators, and solar batteries. It was essential to select the right people to do this challenging work; we conducted several rounds of training to weed out unsuitable candidates. Once the team was in the field, we had quality control personnel and a survey manager in place to catch and correct mistakes.
Rigorous recruitment, training, and supervision of field workers allowed us to successfully complete the baseline and midline studies for this project (the endline study is still to come) and address multiple challenges along the way.
To learn more about this household survey and how we built our team of field workers, read the full blog post. We’ll post another household survey tip next week.
