Data Management

We recently interviewed Faizan Diwan, who many of you may know from his work with SurveyCTO. Prior to joining the Dobility team, he spent several years as a Research Manager for Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) in Kenya, where he led multiple large-scale impact evaluations spanning finance, labor, agriculture, and public health, managed the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics in Nairobi, and helped lead IPA Kenya’s efforts to shift from paper-based to tablet-based surveys. We asked him about digital data collection and his advice for others.

Researchers at the Right to Education Resource Centre of the Indian Institute of Management are studying the implementation of the RTE Act in Indian states, with a special focus on Section 12(1)(c), which mandates that a minimum of 25% of seats in private primary schools be reserved for children from disadvantaged economic backgrounds. Right now, they are working in collaboration with Central Square Foundation (and using SurveyCTO!) to follow up with 2000 children who were part of an earlier study on the impact of different information campaigns on enrolling eligible students in private schools.

Nishmeet Singh is a Senior Research Analyst with Outline India, a research firm focused on impact at the grassroots level through data-driven decision-making. With two degrees in economics and experience working on projects with Save the Children, Girl Rising, Water Aid, and IMPAQ International, we were eager to learn more about his role at Outline India, his advice for other researchers, and his recent research on forced child labor in the mica mining areas of Jharkhand.

SurveyCTO user Bruno Schoumaker is a professor of demography at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. We recently connected about his research on French-speaking African immigrants and their descendants in Belgium and how he is using SurveyCTO in his work.

The Kenya Patient Safety Impact Evaluation (KePSIE) is a unique partnership between the Kenyan Government and the World Bank Group (WBG). It is the largest trial to date aimed at improving patient safety in low- and middle-income countries. We wanted to learn more about KePSIE and how SurveyCTO is playing a role in the research, so we reached out to Guadalupe Bedoya, an economist in the Development Impact Evaluation team at the World Bank's Research Group and the Team Leader and co-principal investigator of the impact evaluation.

Many organizations work with service providers and local survey firms to implement their research projects. But how do you ensure data quality, data security, and timely – even immediate – access to your data? If you work with service providers or survey firms, you can demand that they use a data collection technology like SurveyCTO and set up simple yet powerful systems for quality control and real-time monitoring.

When you use SurveyCTO for your data collection, you collect better data, your data is more secure, and your turn-around time is faster. As a service provider or survey firm, you may have encountered prospective or current clients who wanted to learn more about the opportunities afforded by digital data collection. To help you make the case for digital data collection, we've created the resources below from the perspective of a service provider. Feel free to adapt these materials when discussing SurveyCTO with your clients.

What are the advantages - and challenges - of running an experiment in the field rather than in a lab? We recently caught up with long-time SurveyCTO user Abbie Turiansky about her research, specifically the lab-in-the-field experiments she has run in Haiti. Abbie is a PhD candidate at UC Davis in the Agricultural and Resource Economics department, focusing on social behavior related to the provision and management of public goods and common-pool resources.

During the past few years, Chile has seen a marked increase in the number of immigrants entering the country, many of whom are seeking better economic conditions. Public policy has not kept pace with the complex realities on the ground; as such, the J-PAL Latin America and the Caribbean (J-PAL LAC) sees a critical role for the generation of evidence than can inform policy and programming. We connected with J-PAL LAC's Constanza Palacios to learn more about one of their current projects, "Integration of migrants in Chile: the impact of networking."

Sumeet Patil is the Research Director at NEERMAN, an impact evaluation and policy research organization based in Mumbai that works in water and sanitation, environmental health, agriculture, energy, and disaster management. Sumeet oversees research study design, quality control, data analysis, and publishing, and he leads strategic business development for the organization. We asked Sumeet to tell us about a few recent projects, how he uses SurveyCTO, and why he recommends transitioning away from paper-based surveys.

How do you encourage girls to enroll in school and engage them sufficiently so they continue their education? We asked Woubedle Alemayehu, the senior program manager in the impact evaluation unit at Social Impact, to tell us more about the evaluation for the Discovery Learning Alliance Discovery Girls Education Project she's leading in Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria.