We've been collaborating with J-PAL for months on their MITx course "Designing and Running Randomized Evaluations" - and we're excited that students will finally get to participate in the SurveyCTO activities we've helped design.
We recently connected with Sharon Weir, the co-founder of 4th Wheel Social Impact (4WSI), about how SurveyCTO aligns with their work improving the way social programs in India are conceptualized, implemented, monitored, and evaluated. She shared details of a recent project in Bangalore that is assessing the impact of life skills program for local youth and why digital data collection is great for researchers AND respondents.
The Population Council conducts research to address critical health and development issues around the world. We recently connected with Andrea J. Melnikas about the Council's work in empowering and improving the lives of adolescent girls through her research on child marriage. She is using tools like WhatsApp and Google Sheets for real-time monitoring and collaboration in India, Malawi, Mali, and Niger to determine approaches to delay early marriage.
Laterite is a data, research, and technical advisory firm based in Rwanda and Ethiopia - and uses SurveyCTO for everything from short M&E questionnaires to long, complex impact evaluations in education, health, agriculture, governance, and other sectors. Recently, they started using SurveyCTO in innovative ways to streamline and scale up their enumerator hiring and management processes.
The SurveyCTO team occasionally fields questions about how to keep projects running smoothly, even when, for example, the government shuts down the internet. Most recently, we've been hearing from users in Ethiopia who are struggling to manage government restrictions on accessing the internet.
SurveyCTO user Bruno Schoumaker is a professor of demography at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. We recently connected about his research on French-speaking African immigrants and their descendants in Belgium and how he is using SurveyCTO in his work.
Learn about SurveyCTO projects around the world - including The Sesame Street Hygiene Reach Study Survey in Nigeria, a bean baseline survey in Zimbabwe, a household water use survey in Kiribati, and more - in our August edition of SurveyCTO Photos from the Field.
Oxfam, a long-time SurveyCTO user, recently released their "Mobile Survey Toolkit," which identifies SurveyCTO as one of its "most valuable tools" for mobile data collection.
What are the advantages - and challenges - of running an experiment in the field rather than in a lab? We recently caught up with long-time SurveyCTO user Abbie Turiansky about her research, specifically the lab-in-the-field experiments she has run in Haiti. Abbie is a PhD candidate at UC Davis in the Agricultural and Resource Economics department, focusing on social behavior related to the provision and management of public goods and common-pool resources.
We're kicking off a new series for the SurveyCTO blog - photos from our users around the world. This round, we're featuring submissions from the Philippines, Mozambique, Uganda, and more.
How do you develop a successful financial coaching program? Jonathan Rollins, a Senior Research Associate with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), is working with IPA partners to design, build, implement, and test a financial coaching program in Peru that consolidates sector- and context-specific knowledge with academic research and industry best practices. We asked Jonathan to describe his work and how his project is using SurveyCTO as a client management tool.
How do you improve access to family planning resources and reduce rates of HIV infection in Sub-Saharan Africa? In Zambia, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) researchers are studying the mass distribution and marketing campaign for the new Maximum Diva Woman’s Condom to help answer these questions. We connected with Jessie Pinchoff, one of the principal investigators (PI's) on the project, to learn more about Maximum Diva (Ed. Note: best product name ever), how IPA is structuring their research, and how SurveyCTO is being used to support IPA's work.
Last week, we joined "Managing confidential research data," a class on research design and methods at MIT taught by Dr. Micah Altman. We thought SurveyCTO users would appreciate the key take-aways.
One of the research projects we're watching closely is the Global Early Adolescent Study (GEAS) based out of the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. We asked GEAS Senior Research Program Coordinator Lydia Animosa, MSPH, about what they've learned so far about early adolescence from their 15 study sites around the world and if they have any lessons for researchers embarking on complex, multi-year studies.
After a successful pilot of a pandemic simulation using SurveyCTO earlier this year, members of our team had the pleasure of participating in its implementation as part of the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) module "Fundamentals of Policy Analysis and Decision Making," a required course for 250 Masters in Public Policy students.
As SurveyCTO has grown, so has the range of projects for which the platform is being used to collect high-quality data, evaluate programs, and conduct research. Who is using SurveyCTO? And how have they leveraged the platform to get more accurate, real-time data? Below are a few case studies from our users...
SurveyCTO allows you to publish incoming data directly from the server to Google Sheets (formerly known as Google Spreadsheets), so you can create dashboards that present up-to-the-minute summaries of your data. You can then use these dashboards to monitor the progress of your surveys, share real-time results with your team, and more. This post shares a simple example.