Household survey goes Green

The boom in information technology has inspired the household survey data collection to go digital. Pie Moya, senior research manager at IRRI's Social Sciences Division, led the use of digital technology in conducting the surveys to collect household data, resulting in huge savings on cost of printing, encoding, and handling of questionnairesnot to mention trees.

Development
In September 2011, SSD staff members Orlee Velarde and Dehner de Leon assessed the viability of using various devices (Android and iOS tablets) and Web-based applications (Google Forms and Survey Monkey) in conducting the digital household survey. Orlee started developing the Esurvey database with the use of MS Access-based application and it took him about a month inclusion of testing and inputs of the variables needed. Mr. Velarde installed a redistributable plug-in thru Access Runtime (http://msdn.microsoft.com/enus/office/bb229700). For each tablet without the need to install the Proprietary MS Office application. This means that purchasing additional commercial software won't be necessary to serve the purpose of these tablets. As for the training of the Enumerators (Joel Reano and Rose San Valentin) it took only a day or 2 to understand the use of the Esurvey tablet.

Benefits

Head to head Paper vs. Digital

The great advantage of implementing the tablet was the cost. Having your typical questionnaire would involve additional manpower, shipping, storage, print, and admin costs. Unlike the tablet, the only cost would be preventive maintenance.
2 Enumerators doing the traditional paper survey

Trial of E-survey tablet

The E-survey tablet was first tested on November 27, 2011 under the Central Luzon loop survey project. A 23 page questionnaire targeting 108 respondents was tailored fit to 2 tablets. It took the research team 3 weeks to gather a total of 81 sampling with minimum error. Ready to export and integrate to SSDs statistical analysis software such SPSS and STATA.
An IRRI SSD staff doing his survey with the use of tablet

Efficiency
Traditional datasets consume a lot of office space and data archives since the 60s

Benefit - Cost Analysis

Below is a sample cost analysis of the Traditional Questionnaire vs. Tablet

With the use of the tablet, the encoding process was excluded giving the research team more time to allocate in data analysis rather than rekeying the data sets gathered using the traditional printed sampling. Quality of data is more reliable since the inputs are direct from the household. The occasional error in encoding will now be a thing of the past.

Added Benefits
Other added benefits are the enthusiastic participation of the farmers. It was a very exciting experience said one researcher. Farmers usually frown when they see an researcher carrying thick questionnaires, but using a tablet PC, an interview becomes amusing both for the farmer and the enumerator as well.

Constraints
Some minor constraints for the use of tablet are power consumption (needs charging every 6hours), the visibility of the tablet on brightly lit areas is affected, and risk of loss.

Implementation and Future Use

So far 3 projects are underway with the use of the Esurvey tablet. Dr. Kei Kajias have ordered 4 new tablets to apply to their project and Dr. Takashi Yamano under the STRASA project based in IRRI India will be trying surveybe. Some other teams will be adapting to it as well with the use of CS Pro - a freeware that can be downloaded from US Census website. SSDs RDM team would try to use other functions such as GPS and direct to cloud repository. They are also eyeing on other tablet devices such as ipad, galaxy tab and understand its database functionality and development.
IRRI SSD Research Database Management team together with its collaborating team