Survey ID Number
KHM-NIS-CSES-2003/04-v1.0
Title
Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey 2003-04, Household Survey 2004
Data Collection Notes
Interviewers and supervisors were initially divided into teams of five persons (one supervisor and four interviewers), making in total 50 teams for the fieldwork. Each month, 25 teams were working in the field with a workload of 10 households per interviewer. In urban areas, 4 PSUs were allocated to one team while in rural areas, 2 PSUs were allocated. The fieldwork plan was designed in order to gather around 60 households monthly per team.
For a given month, the team arrived in the village three days before the first day of the month to tend to preparatory tasks like discussing with village authorities, filling out the Household Listing Form, and thereafter sample those households to be interviewed.
The Village Form was filled out by the supervisor.
The Household Questionnaire had 16 sections that were filled out by the interviewer during the first visit to the household, and in the following four weeks according to the following scheme:
FIRST VISIT: Initial visit
WEEK 1: Education and literacy, Housing
WEEK 2: Household economic activities, Household liabilities, Household income from other sources, and other expenditures (partial non-food recall)
WEEK 3: Durable goods and other expenses, Construction activities in the past 12 months, Nutrition, Fertility and child care, Mortality
WEEK 4: Health check of children, Current economic activity, Health, HIV/AIDS, Victimization
Once the month ended, the team went back to the NIS headquarters in Phnom Penh.
Questionnaires from the same PSU was delivered to the Data Management team by the supervisor in a packet including all of the documents used and produced in the fieldwork, including maps, enumeration lists, questionnaires, diaries, etc. Before going to the villages, teams were briefed and introduced to minor adjustments of the interviewing procedure that had to be made as a result of monitoring activities and feed-back from the data processing. Annex 5 contains an example (the first survey month) from the allocation of teams to PSUs.
The fieldwork started in November 2003 and was scheduled to end in December 2004. However, some more basic data was needed for the analyses, and the fieldwork was extended to include January 2005.
Fifty (50) supervisors and 200 enumerators were recruited by NIS and trained for the fieldwork. The training took place in Phnom Penh and lasted three weeks for supervisors and two weeks for enumerators. Before the start of each fieldwork month, there were briefing and retraining sessions. Each fieldwork team included one supervisor and four enumerators. In urban areas one enumerator was responsible for one PSU and for interviewing 10 households, while in rural areas two enumerators were responsible for one PSU and for interviewing 20 households. In all, 125 enumerators and supervisors, divided into 25 teams, were carrying out the fieldwork at the same time. Two such team groups were formed and each team group alternated monthly.
Enumerator and Supervisor training
Initial training was provided during nine days for a group of 20-30 staff (not all were attending all the time). This training included a translation into Khmer of selected parts of the questionnaire, and a field test in a village outside Phnom Penh where the participants performed test interviews in 16 households. The experiences from this exercise were followed up during the course. The course also included general aspects on survey methodology and ways of controlling for errors. Many of the findings from this training served as input to later stages.
Prior to the start of the fieldwork intensive interviewer and supervisor training was carried out. The 200 interviewers and 50 supervisors recruited were split into two groups, each consisting of 100 interviewers and 25 supervisors. The two groups later alternated so that the first group did their fieldwork during odd survey months (i.e. November, January, March …) while the second group covered the even survey months (i.e. December 2003, February, April …).
The training was designed with this in mind. The first group was trained in October 2003 while the second group was trained in November 2003 using premises at the NIS head office. Training of the first group was provided in English by a WB consultant and simultaneously interpreted in Khmer by the appointed NIS officer. The second group was trained by NIS only.
Common was that the supervisors were first trained during one week, and then jointly with their interviewers for two weeks. Before all fieldwork months the group in turn was gathered at the NIS to walk through the questionnaire and manuals in order to correct errors that were detected during the briefing sessions or the monitoring operations, and to learn how to handle any changes that were introduced to the survey instruments.
Training manuals are large and have not been attached. They can however be obtained at NIS.
Questionnaires
Five different questionnaires or forms were used in the survey:
Form 1: Household listing sheets to be used in the sampling procedure in the enumeration areas.
Form 2: Village questionnaire answered by the village leader about economy and infrastructure, crop production, health, education, retail prices and sales prices of agriculture, employment and wages, and recruitment of children for work outside the village.
Form 3: Household questionnaire with questions for each household member, including modules on migration, education and literacy, housing conditions, crop production, household liabilities, durable goods, construction activities, nutrition, fertility and child care, child feeding and vaccination, health of children, mortality, current economic activity, health and illness, smoking, HIV/AIDS awareness, and victimization.
Form 4: Diary form on daily household expenditure and income
Form 5: Time use form detailing activities of household members during one 24-hour period.
Questionnaire design
The questionnaire is one of the first items in a strategy for quality control in data collection through surveys. Any piece of information to be collected must be formulated as a question so that all interviewers can be trained to read the questions in the same way. The questions must be formulated in such a way that all interviewers feel comfortable reading the questions aloud and that all respondents understand the questions in the same way. The layout of the questionnaire must be done so that the interviewer immediately understands how the respondent's answer should be recorded. A lot of work is normally needed to meet these requirements that are built into the process of communication in the interview situation. This is the kind of work in which final perfection is elusive and further improvements can always be made.
The initial work on questionnaire design resulted in a first draft prepared by NIS in early 2003. With expert assistance from Statistics Sweden in March the same year, a systematic walk-through question by question was done. A number of essential problems to be solved were then identified while errors or minor problems were attended to at once. At the end of the exercise some issues remained that were discussed at a meeting with users and stakeholders and then were referred to a larger group within NIS.
Another set of serious deficiencies in the questionnaires was recognized by a WB consultant in June 2003. At this stage the questionnaires included additional modules or questions demanded by stakeholders. It was suggested that the growing complexity of the whole survey would require more training of the fieldwork staff than was originally planned for. Major revisions of the questionnaires were also made at this point.
The pilot was carried out in June in two provinces with a sample of 870 households. When analyzing the survey, the NIS core team identified another number of problems still to be tended to and agreed to some fairly substantial changes in the questionnaires that were used. The many interventions by various parties, already mentioned, with special interests had under way led to the inclusion of several modules and questions with different formats and standards for questions. A main thrust of the agreements by the NIS core team was to ensure comparability with previous rounds of the CSES and more uniformity of formats and standards in the questionnaires.
The proposals, which the NIS core team for the CSES 2004 did agree upon, were then implemented. Using the combined technical expertise at hand, improvements in formulations and in the formatting of all the questionnaires were made. In the beginning of August the household questionnaire was finished while diary forms, the time use form and the village questionnaire remained to be completed.
NIS was able to start work with the translation of the household questionnaire from English to Khmer in September. In the meantime, a World Bank consultant had started to review the existing supervisor and interviewer manuals.
According to the NIS time plan, translation and printing of the questionnaires and manuals had to be completed by early October for training of supervisors to start 6 October and of interviewers to start 13 October. The first group of fieldworkers could then be dispatched to the sampled villages all over Cambodia after completed training 25 October. The training cycle of the second group of supervisors and interviewers would be done in November for the fieldwork starting 1 December.
The resulting set contains 5 forms or questionnaires:
Household listing form
Village questionnaire
Household questionnaire
Dairy sheet
Time Use form
The Household listing was done prior to the sampling, and recorded household information on e.g. location, number of members, principal economic activity. The Village questionnaire was used to gather basic common information on demography, economy, infrastructure, rainfall and natural disasters, education, health, retail prices, employment and wages, access to common property, sales prices of land, and recruitment of children for work.
The following modules were included in the Household questionnaire:
- Basic household information
a. List of household members
b. Summary of presence in the household
c. Information on migration
d. Food consumption during the last 7 days (recall method)
- Education and literacy
- Housing
- Household economic activities
e. Land ownership
f. Production of crops
g. Cost of cultivation
h. Hypothetical questions on rental and sales market
i. Inputs and outputs of livestock raising activities
j. Input and output from fish cultivation
k. Inputs and outputs from forestry and hunting
l. Inventory of household non-agricultural economic activities during the past 12 months
- Household liabilities
- Household income from other sources
- Durable goods and other expenditures (partial non-food recall)
- Construction activities in the past 12 months
- Nutrition
- Fertility and child care
m. Fertility history
n. Child feeding and vaccinations
- Mortality
- Health check of children
- Current economic activity
o. Activity status during the past 7 days
p. Main occupation during the past 7 days
q. Employment and earnings during the last 12 months
- Health
r. Illnesses during the past 4 weeks
s. Smoking
- HIV/AIDS
- Victimization
- The Dairy sheet (diary method) recorded
- Expenditure and consumption of own-produced food
- Household income and receipts
The Time Use form was used to record main activities hour by hour during a 24 hour period. The activities were grouped into 22 categories e.g. Sleeping, Eating, School etc.
All questionnaires are found in Annex 10. Enumerator and supervisor manuals have not been attached. They can however be obtained at NIS.