In this lesson, we're going to take a look at how to prepare for fieldwork. One of the first things that you'll need to do as you prepare for fieldwork will be to do a training of your data collectors. In order to do that, you'll need some training materials. In this lesson, we're going to take a brief overview of what training materials are necessary and what training materials are available as part of the RADAR coverage toolkit. The broad lines of the training components will be; first, you will need a section that introduces your data collectors to the program and the survey. That will typically involve something about the objectives or what the program is meant to be doing, the organizations involved, etc. Then you'll want to review the roles and responsibility of all the survey staff in order to make sure that tasks are clearly understood and delineated. Then you'll want to review what enumeration areas are, what maps are, how to use them, and also how to find households. You will definitely need a section on human subject research. Going over the ethical considerations related to human subject research, you'll also need a substantial section on CAPI and tablet handling and navigation, followed by or simultaneously done with a question-by-question questionnaire review. What I mean by simultaneously is you could look at how to use the tablet and then how to use the questionnaire and the tablet at the same time. But you'll also separately need some time to really dig into each one of the questions as well as the answer options to make sure that your data collectors have a very comprehensive understanding of what the questionnaire and what each individual question is asking. You will need some language training as well, depending what the language situation is in your particular area of interest. The language training could be pretty straightforward if you're only doing your interview in one other language. If you've got a very complicated language situation, then this might actually take a little bit longer, so you need to plan accordingly. If you're choosing to do anthropometry, this also adds quite a bit to the training time because you need not only to train on the concepts of anthropometry but also to allow some time for your data collectors to practice measuring children and wing children. You need to plan accordingly if you are doing this module. Very importantly, you need to make sure to have some time for field practice. Field practice is an essential part of training because it is the only thing that will really allow you to get a sense of what your data collectors have retained during your training and how they will be in the field. It allows you also to make your final selections in terms of who you want to retain and who you want to keep on a reserve list. In a later lecture, we're going to go into more depth about the different components of training. But in general, this is what you need to be mindful of the different sections that will be part of any training for households cover survey. As you go along in your training, you will need to make sure that you have a way to assess trainee knowledge to make sure that if there are blind spots, you're addressing them as you go along, and to really just make sure that the information that you're providing is actually being retained by the data collectors that you're training. The first way that you can assess the trainee knowledge is by adopting an interactive presentation style. By that, we mean, if you allow students to speak up during the training and ask questions as you go along, you can on the go assess how much information is being retained as you go along and address the blind spots as they come up. For a more systematic approach to assessing trainee knowledge, you should also look at everybody's homework. As part of the RADAR toolkit, there is a set of homework that you can assign to your data collectors for them to complete for the next day. If you do either a group review, which is easier for the facilitators because they don't have to individually review and grade everybody's homework, then you can make sure that all the information gets reviewed as a group. If you do want to get more insight on how individuals are doing, or just generally how the group is doing, it might be a good idea to once in a while pick up all the homework and do a review yourself just to make sure that people are answering the questions the way that you're hoping that they are. One final additional way to assess trainee knowledge is the classic method of quizzes and exams. Quizzes, there should be a number of them along the way. Try to avoid only having exams at the end or quizzes at the end because even the information that's presented early on is very important, and it's just a good way to make sure that people make that extra effort to retain the information and to go home and review the information. If they know that quizzes are coming up, they're more likely to try to retain information as they go along. One more substantial exam at the end allows you to make sure that by the time that they're exiting the training, you've given them an exam that reviews comprehensively all of the information that was presented during the training. That gives you a good assessment of where they are in terms of the knowledge that they retained for the whole duration. It's also a very important criteria for selecting your interviewers towards the end, when you have to make a selection of who gets to go to the field as part of your survey team and who makes it to the waitlist. This will be helpful. It's also helpful for determining your team leaders and your supervisors. These three methods used simultaneously or rather jointly, will allow you to make sure that the information you think that you're imparting is actually being received by the data collectors. To add to the existing training materials that are available as part of the radar toolkit, we have some training activities and some evaluations. As part of your data collector training, you will likely want to have some different activities, the role-plays situations that you want to put your data collectors in to see how they'll handle them. As I mentioned previously, some regular evaluations such as quizzes and exams. All of those are available for you to use. There is a data collector training agenda, which is one way of putting together all the components I mentioned in the first slide. The first slide is a presentation of the components that need to go into the training. The order in which you do it is up to you. It's a discretion decision. But we do have a sample data collector training agenda that we think has a good flow to it and is easy to use and fairly straightforward, so you can use that. We also have some manuals available. We have the manuals for the data collectors as well as for team leaders and supervisors, which basically captures most of the information, if not all of the information, or at least the key information that you'll be presenting in your training. It's meant to be manuals that are used during training for data collectors to get familiar with the content. It's also a good reference document for them to have in the field if they happen to forget something or just need to double-check. Most of the information is captured in the manuals. There is, within these manuals, the roles and responsibilities of those survey staff comprised in that. Again, people can refer to it at a later date. There is also, as part of the manuals, still information on how to use the mapping materials for data collection. There is an overview of the baseline coverage survey questionnaires. This is again, a form comprised in the manual and that allows the data collectors to review what the questions are in the questionnaire, why they're being asked that way, etc. There's more information there as well on human subject, research, ethics. Separately, there is an independent manual that's available in a number of different languages that gives more information on human subjects research and can serve as a reference for data collectors in the field to make sure that they're respecting research ethics. Finally, for the team leaders and the supervisors, there are some additional resources available for them. The manual that I've mentioned before, as well as within that manual, there are some forms for them to fill out to help them with their supervision as well as quality insurance of the incoming data. In addition to all of this, there are some practice scenarios that you can use to either demonstrate. Towards the beginning of training, you can use these scenarios to role-play in front of the group and show people how to handle particular scenarios. Or later in your training, you can use those scenarios for people to role-play with one another. Breaking up into pairs, having one role-play of interviewer, one role-play of interviewee and they can use these scenarios to practice the interviewing skills. There's also some scenarios that specifically look at entering a household. What are the steps that you need to do and to make sure that you're entering a household appropriately and respectfully. Finally, there are some scenarios that focus more on data quality assurance issues. They really make sure they focus on data collectors being able to enter information properly and ensuring that there's appropriate data quality as a result. All of these resources, most of them, have some sections that need to be adapted for your specific surveys. Those will be in a different color and pretty straightforward for you to go in and adapt to your local context or your project context. But the generic versions of all of these resources are available on our website for you to download and to use and adapt at as needed.
