If you sit on an institutional review board (IRB) or other research ethics committee, you need to know how to assess projects that use electronic forms of data collection. Rest assured that data confidentiality with electronic data collection can actually be substantially safer than paper... if handled properly. This post discusses a series of questions that a research ethics committee should ask of projects employing electronic data collection...
Graduate students have more to think about when it comes to electronic data collection. As students, timelines and budgets are tight, especially for those collecting data abroad. There are three short months in the summer to land in-country and collect data before returning to campus. And there’s likely little room for error with the budget. Luckily, with some planning and preparation, electronic data collection can maximize results within these constraints.
You need to collect some data. You’re familiar with pen-and-paper data collection, but you’ve decided to make the leap and enjoy the benefits of electronic data collection. Now you have a lot of questions...
In addition to vastly-improved offline support via local wi-fi networks, we added a REST API for programmatic access to server data and made some smaller improvements for Excel users.
It started as a modest experiment in electronic data collection embedded within a much more ambitious experiment involving microfinance in rural India. Today, SurveyCTO has grown into a mature technology platform used to collect data in hundreds of projects around the world. This inaugural blog post seems like a good time to look briefly back, and then forward to where SurveyCTO is headed...