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Aine Seitz McCarthy
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Justification for PDAs in data collection

3/25/2012

2 Comments

 
Last summer at a research workshop in Tanzania, my field coordinators and PIs were big proponents of using personal digital assistants (PDAs) instead of the old fashioned paper interviews. As I prepare to collect baseline data using a pretty extensive household survey (trying hard to keep it under two hours), here's some solid empirical evidence from the Journal of Development Economics in support of them.

Evidence from a randomized experiment:
We find that PAPI [Pen and paper interviewing] data contain a large number of errors, which can be avoided in CAPI [computer-assisted personal interviewing]. Error counts are not randomly distributed across the sample, but are correlated with household characteristics, potentially introducing sample bias if dubious observations need to be dropped.

2 Comments
Caroline Knowles link
7/16/2012 03:00:09 am

We were very interested to see your comments about using PDAs for data collection. Young Lives has carried out 3 rounds of a longitudinal household and child survey using pen and paper. We started to use PDAs in Round 3 in some of our sites, and are planning to use them in all 4 of our study countries in the next survey round. We are working in some very remote sites so there were many factors to consider, which we set out in our Methods Guide. Our Peru team also reviewed the potential bias that might be introduced by using PDAs. They found no significant differences between the results obtained from PDA-based questionnaires and paper-based questionnaires. But they also concluded that training for fieldworkers is important to ensure that their interaction and rapport with survey respondents does not suffer due to them focusing on the technology rather than the person they are interviewing.

Caroline Knowles, Youny Lives, University of Oxford

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go to this site link
7/29/2013 06:02:31 pm

This is a very informative page you have posted here on your blog. The news on the pds system was very helpful for me. The page is drafted in a very attractive way. I really like the photos you have posted here on your page.

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    Aine Seitz McCarthy

    International development, economics and some pretty ambitious ideas from a stubborn graduate student clinging to her sense of adventure.


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