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Aine Seitz McCarthy
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Update from Arusha

7/6/2012

3 Comments

 
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I've been in Arusha, Tanzania for the past week, a medium-sized city city that functions as a launch pad for international NGOs, safaris and Kilimanjaro treks. For me, its more like a temporary logistics center with stable internet connections, frequent meetings to sort our permits, access to peanut butter, and a lot of wazungus (I even attended a Fourth of July party with burgers and watermelon). There are plenty of challenges, but most of them just physical: getting sick, lost and struggling with Swahili. Whereas the successes so far have been more enduring: making helpful connections, progress at meetings with cool NGOs, understanding development according to Tanzanians and slowly making progress programming my surveys.

I'm also staying in what is basically a researcher flop house, the home/office to the Lion Research Center and Savannahs Forever. It's quite interesting to chat over tea with the range of folks staying here: wildlife veterinarians, enumerators, ecologists and an agricultural economist with children, all spending a few days in Arusha on their way to somewhere else. This flophouse atmosphere gave way to a pretty unique moment last night where I was joined in my late-night programming adventures, with extension cords stretched and Youth Lagoon blaring (props to QSM), by two researchers who shared my music taste and a very important piece of advice:

You cannot tell your enumerators what exactly you're looking for because they will hand it to you on a silver platter.

As the Maryland economist elaborated, holding back the exact goal of research may feel secretive or condescending, but because enumeration is apparently terribly boring, folks often look for the right answer. Which has the problem of throwing a slight bias in results. And, as I've already experienced, Tanzanians, being so polite, are happy to tell me exactly what I want to hear.

On Sunday, I head out to the Meatu district villages to begin searching for enumerators to hire. More to come on the next adventure: hiring and training enumerators without telling them what exactly I'm researching.

3 Comments
ironmonkey285
7/9/2012 02:46:35 am

Nice, I'm seeing youth lagoon this sunday.

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Emilia link
7/30/2012 06:32:26 am

First, enjoying your blog, Aine!

Second, I think the advice not to give enumerators a chance to 'hand you your results' needs a caveat (Better the bias you know?): people will look for a purpose, and if you don't give them one, they might invent one that yields worse biases than what would have resulted if you had told them what kinds of topics you are trying to learn about...

I was just observing a survey in Peru (some households had received financial education, others hadn't -- this was the endline). The enumerators had not been told the goal (probably for the reasons you're worried about), so they invented their own goal: we're testing whether the mothers remember what they learned in the workshops! This resulted in some leading questions about what an ATM card does ("Are you sure this is your answer?"), and hypothetical questions being framed as having to do with "understanding interest rates" when they were eliciting preferences... Things like that. So, sometimes, better the devil you know!

It should be easier to train to avoid a known bias than for the million made up biases that may result if you tell enumerators too little :)

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Aine Seitz McCarthy
8/9/2012 11:57:25 pm

Thanks for the comment, Emilia! You bring up a good point about enumerators looking for a purpose for all the data collection. I certainly wouldn't want imagined biases making their way into the data.

I've only just started my baseline, so there's a lot less to look for this round. My enumerators are extremely sharp and I'm sure I'll be giving them more information carefully as we work together over the next couple of years.

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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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