There are a number of common pains and ailments experienced by practitioners conducting livelihood surveys, particularly in remote communities.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on the Thrive Blog. It is cross-posted here with permission.
Unplanned delays in questionnaire design and piloting, variations in interviewing techniques and enumerator behaviours, respondent fatigue and unreliable data entry are a few.
Our recent experience in Lao PDR’s Nam Xong river basin provided some palliative, symptomatic relief. Here we tested out digital tablets as an alternative to paper based surveys.
Generally, we have only one opportunity to conduct field surveys in the Mekong; they are expensive and resource intensive, so it’s far better to identify any problems, make all the mistakes and correct them during planning and piloting. Questionnaire design, enumerator training, piloting, revision, data entry and validation have previously taken 4-6 months. The same process took only 4 weeks with the digital tablets. And we saved about 20,000 pages of printing.
Continue reading this story on the Thrive Blog
Dr. John Ward works for the Mekong Regional Futures Institute specializes in integrated natural resource management, with a focus on participatory processes, science-policy interactions and trans-disciplinary research. Dr. Alex Smajgl is the Managing Director of the Bangkok-based Mekong Futures Research Institute.
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Tablet in hand and drone in the sky, EcoAg evaluates on-farm conservation in Honduras
Top photo from Stanislas Fradelizi/World Bank on The World Bank Photo Collection on Flickr.
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