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Field Survey Team Training: A Good Practices Guide for Research Managers, Field Managers & Field Executives

Now that you have hired a good field team consisting of qualified enumerators and perhaps even their supervisors and field managers, the next step is training them. When NEERMAN first started conducting evaluation surveys in 2007, we were aghast at how little importance was placed on training by even reputed and international survey firms. The trainings were relegated to field managers, researchers only came for a day-or-two, and the focus was on wrapping training in <5 days. Training cannot be hurried or be considered a check-box item. 

Following are the objectives we recommend setting for the training of field teams:

  • Standardize enumerators so that all of them code answers by respondents in the same way.  This should be focused especially for the primary (or important) outcomes because standardization takes time
  • Test and weed out weak enumerators who are unable to understand and administer questions correctly, lack proficiency in handling tablet and app for surveys, show poor inter-personal survey skills, and show bad attitude. All this cannot be tested in 2-3 days – this needs continuous assessment using different approaches – talks, observations, demonstrations, written tests
  • Ensure proper knowledge for study objectives, purpose and meaning of all question and their answers, sampling protocol, quality assurance, and survey management procedures.
  • Give skills for faster navigation of the survey and tips for increasing productivity.

Below, are some tips and recommendations for field team training:

1. Preplanning and Training of Trainers: Proper preplanning of training sessions, content, tools to be used, and who will train is important.  Develop measurable criteria to know that you have trained your team properly, and allow 1-2 days extra in case you need retraining for any reason.

2. Researcher-led Training: The researcher should be available throughout the training including field practice and its debriefing. Field managers can lead more repetitive and intense parts of the training – such as question-by-question explanation – but researchers need to lead debriefing, demonstration, and training on primary outcomes (at least).

3. Sufficient Duration: Large surveys like NFHS or a rigorous impact evaluation survey require three to four weeks of intensive training, but even small sample surveys usually require 5-6 days for training. Anything less usually means cutting corners and not doing one of the following.

4. Provide hard-copy of tools and manuals: Even when data is collated using Tablets and Apps, each team member should be provided one set of questionnaires and the manual explaining questions and survey procedures in hard-copy (on paper). During training, participants must write tips, keywords, suggestions, examples in the master copy for their own reference. If questionnaires and procedures change during training, then you may have to provide a fresh set of paper questionnaires and manuals reflecting these changes prior to starting the fieldwork.

5. Train on Local dialect: Train all the enumerators on local dialect or meanings for keywords and key-concepts from the tools. For example, janwar (Animal in Marathi and Hindi) is used to mean a Snake in some parts of Maharashtra. Menstruation is known by different terminology across India.

6. Question by Question discussion: Each question should be discussed and practiced during training; it will help to develop better clarity of questions and uniform understanding among all team members.

7. CAPI or App training: Special training session is needed on the handling of tablets, App navigation, and troubleshooting problems while using technology in rural Indian contexts of poor electricity or network connectivity. Ideally, enumerators hired should be experienced in working with CAPI.  If not, this training itself can take a day.

8. Mock Interviews: People learn best when the same concepts are taught through different mediums. Mock interviews can be done one-on-one between a supervisor/trainer and an enumerator or between two enumerators. One-on-one mock is best to understand each question, navigation, CAPI App, etc.  A debriefing session after all mocks are done is a must to clarify doubts and even fix questionnaires and manuals as needed.

9. Group mocks are usually led by a supervisor or a senior enumerator who role-plays a respondent and 6-8 enumerators ask and code answers. These mocks are best suited to standardize enumerators as well as identify weaknesses that need special training. Group mock should also be followed with a debriefing.

10. Demonstration Interviews: Some questions need skills in administration that can be best demonstrated between two experts such as a trainer and the field manager who role play. These sessions can be also be combined where trainers demonstrate the right and poor ways of doing things and enumerators are asked to discuss why.

11. Standardization: Primary outcomes are measured using one or several questions which are then combined to form one or any indicators during data processing. Whether the questions are subjective (like asking opinions or multi-plie choice questions) or objective (like measuring the height of the children) standardization follow a similar principle. A gold-standard (usually, trainer) enumerator codes answers to questions by a ‘dummy’ respondent along with other enumerators.  The answers of each enumerator are compared against the gold standard and debrief is done if the answer is different.  This process usually needs to be repeated 3-4 times on different dummy respondents before enumerators are standardized

12. Field Practice: Many people use the terms pre-test, pilot, and field practice interchangeably. We recommend field practice to mean a full-dress rehearsal after the in-class training of enumerators is done.  The actual application is an effective way to learn questionnaire and survey administration. Field practice must be done in a similar region as the main study but never in the sampled clusters. Ideally, field practice should be done in two waves – the first practice followed by a debrief session and retraining, and the second wave as a full dress rehearsal. Most surveys need 2 days of field practice with a day for de-briefing. Larger and more complex surveys need 6-7 days of field practice.

Give the above tools and practices a serious try and you will see a marked difference in motivation levels as well as the quality of work by your field team. Note, there are often multiple positions such as a team supervisor and a field manager with different roles and responsibilities in a survey. A special training session is needed for such supervisory positions. Depending on the complexity of the survey, such special sessions need 1-2 days for typical social surveys to 4-5 days for more complex and large surveys.

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