Questionnaire Design: Best Practices for High-Quality Measurements
January 20, 2021
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February 3, 2021
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Hiring Field Survey Enumerators: 5 Good Practices You Can Use

At NEERMAN, we always say, “The only true quality control is the enumerators you hire and how well you train them.” In fact, the on-field data quality assurance starts with the proper recruitment of eligible enumerators. Compromise on qualification and experience in recruitment always affects data quality because of experience and attitude issues. Poor training will not give field survey enumerators adequate skills or standardize them enough to obtain reliable data while ensuring higher productivity.

Below are some of the rules we follow at NEERMAN and recommend to others who seek our advice. Remember, there are always good exceptions to these rules.

5 Rules of Hiring Field Survey Enumerators

1. Prefer enumerators from the same region as they know the cultural dialects and local contexts better, but not from the same village or area because that can bias them.

2. Ensure a proper mix of enumerator sexes because certain instruments can be administered by either males or females. Usually, it is best if females interview females. 

3. We suggest hiring experienced enumerators even if they are a little less educated than a fresh college graduate with no survey experience. We suggest at least 2-years of survey experience.

4. While we recommend the education level of at least a bachelor’s, you must instead focus on their skills in local language plus Hindi/English, their numerical ability to do calculations, and their inter-personal skills. For example, NEERMAN painstakingly assessed over 1000 enumerators across India for the above to include them in our panel.

5. Finally, proper payments to enumerators is a huge deal maker or breaker. Good enumerators rarely charge less than Rs 400 per day and even higher in a few more developed states such as Kerala and Gujarat. We strongly recommend against linking payments to productivity or per-interview payments. Instead, focus on good field supervision to ensure both quality and productivity. Enumerators should get paid for their field expenses (stay, food, travel) in almost immediate basis else they will cut corners. Their professional payment should be made within 2-3 weeks at maximum. Unfortunately, most survey firms in India exploit enumerators by paying less and paying late, and that reflects on the motivation and attitude of enumerators.

How to hire field survey enumerators

Where can you find Good Field Survey Enumerators

The next obvious question is where to actually hire such enumerators. This is best done by hiring a survey firm but not without due diligence on your part to ensure qualifications quoted to you on paper are “real”. You can also join a “market research” group on Linked-in or Facebook and place an advertisement there. We recommend “market research” as a search term because most enumerators have to conduct both social and market research to earn enough. However, you should shortlist enumerators with 2-years of social research experience, okay? Finally, there are several state and region-specific man-power agencies that can provide enumerators, but these agencies cannot be found easily on Google and have to be discovered.

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