Our first advise is not to consider phone surveys if you need random, representative, and trustworthy data for your study. However, if you need urgent and actionable data during COVID-19 times or if data collection cannot be delayed any longer, then phone or web-based surveys are a must. Phone surveys will have 20-40% response rate (and loss will not be random) and need to be limited to <30 minutes. There is no company in India that will have random representative panel of phone- or web-based respondents (except few pockets or a few cities). However, NEERMAN is helping collect as reliable and credible data as we can. We also combine in-field survey for random sampling followed with phone-surveys as when randomness is a must.
For example, we followed a panel of 1800 women from a previous evaluation survey with IFPRI to assess how ANC and PNC services to them were affected in COVID times. For UC San Francisco, we are conducting Facebook surveys of people in the US and India to understand between country differences in family planning practices and gender issues during COVID-19 times. We have conducted surveys of over 2000 NGOs across India to understand how they have supported people during COVID times and how they expect COVID-19 to affect their operations in future.