In this lesson, as we continue to go through everything you need to consider as you prepare for your field work, we're going to look at one very important tool, which is the deployment plan. What is the deployment plan? Well, in some, it's a document that the survey coordination team will put together before going to the field itself, which will guide how teams are supposed to deploy in the field. Basically, as the name suggests, it's a plan for how you're going to deploy to the field. It lets you know which teams will be where and when, and it needs to be carefully thought out considering the geographical realities of the field, the number of teams that will be deploying at the same time, and the expected number of interviews completed per day and or the number of clusters completed per day depending on how you've organized your personal study. The first step that you need to do when you go to develop your deployment plan is to map out your sampled clusters on a actual physical map. Usually you'll have sampled your clusters using a sampling technique that while very important statistically, doesn't actually give you a sense of where things are geographically. Doing this first visual step is really helpful to try and see what the most efficient path is. For example, if you're looking at the image, maybe it might make more sense to go from cluster 1 to 6, to 4, to 2 to 3 to 5, rather than to go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, as you might think would be more efficient if you're only looking at the list of clusters. Another very helpful step from the very beginning is to speak to people who know the terrain. Even when you have a map, the map might not give you a realistic estimation of what the road quality is like, how accessible it is, and all of those things have an impact on how much time it actually takes to reach those clusters. For example, a paved road is a very different situation than a road that is made out of mud that might have a lot of holes in it, etc. In order to really get a good sense of what your travel time will be, speak to people who actually know that area. The next thing you'll want to do is to create a document. For example, Excel is a great tool to use for this, where you'll have all the information about your sampled clusters, including the name, maybe the name of a local guide, just all of the information that's relevant to that cluster. Then you will use what you know about the geography and all of the resources that you have, meaning financial resources and human resources that you have to assign different teams to different clusters in the most efficient and logistical way. Then you'll use what you know about the geography as well as your resources, whether financial or human, to assign the teams to different clusters in the most efficient and the most logical way. You'll also want to assign supervision schedules for all of your supervisors, for your survey coordinator and any other members of central supervision team who might want to do some field supervision. You want to make sure to include any cars and any drivers in the deployment plan as well. They become part of the team during data collection, so they should also be included. You'll want to make sure to have contact information for every single person included in this deployment plan. That means drivers, supervisors, team leaders, data collectors, really thorough comprehensive list of phone numbers in the case that anything happens, it's important to be able to contact individuals as they go along. You also want to make sure that you're including rest days in your plan. Your data collection will likely take a couple of weeks. In some cases it might actually take a few months. So you want to make sure your data collectors have at least one day per week to rest. You don't want those rest days to be on weekends. People tend to be at home a lot more on weekends and it's a more convenient time to speak to them. Particularly if you are including adolescents in your sample, there's a good chance that adolescents would be at school during the week and at home during the weekends, so it's best to plan for a weekday rest day. You also might want to consider making your rest day a day where respondents tend to be at their place of worship, regardless. That day will vary depending on the faith. It's important to learn about the local community in order to know what that day is likely to be. I've already mentioned that the deployment plan gets established before teams deployed to the field. But it also is a living document. It needs to be updated very regularly with the actual information. The survey coordinator will be the point person who will record every day where the teams are. That's helpful for multiple reasons. One, safety. You always wanted to make sure that you know where your teams are and that you've had at least one contact during the day, ideally more but at least one. Additionally, it's helpful to plan for the rest of the survey. You can assess on an ongoing basis, how you're doing in terms of timing compared to what you had planned. If it's taking longer, how are you going to make that up? If you're going to be in communities later than initially planned, maybe there you need to let those community know that you're running late, etc. Having all of that recorded during the data collection is helpful to plan for the immediate next steps. It's also helpful for documentation. Any modifications should be recorded in this deployment plan and that'll be helpful couple of months later when you don't remember why certain decisions were made. Having this deployment well-documented deployment plan is a great resource to be able to refer to. Some additional considerations generally about the deployment plan and also just about the process of deploying. Teams likely will need heavy supervision at the beginning of data collection. For the first week or so, data collectors are trying to find the river. They're trying to get more comfortable with the work. They're still getting familiar to a certain extent with a tablet, with a questionnaire, etc. If it's possible, it's ideal to start your data collection in clusters that are closer to the central office to make sure that everyone in the coordination team can really do hands-on supervision to help data collectors get more familiar with the process of collecting data. You'll want heavy supervision at the beginning, and you'll also want really heavy supervision at the end. Energy, moral, it all starts declining over time as the field work progresses. It's physically demanding, it's emotionally demanding. People are away for their families for the whole data collecting period. Again, it's very rigorous work. Supervision is likely going to be necessary more closely at the end of data collection to counter this tiredness effect. Those are the general considerations to keep in mind as you're creating your deployment plan and as you go along, updating it and making sure that it's as comprehensive and as useful as possible for your studies needs.
