Data collection takes a lot of time, effort, and money. At the end of the day, your goal isn’t just to collect data but to collect reliable, accurate data that you can trust and use.
But when you have surveyor teams in remote locations, tight timelines, and finite budgets, continuously monitoring the quality of your surveyors’ work and regularly analyzing incoming data for problems can be a challenge. To help, SurveyCTO offers an unprecedented mix of features for quality control – so that you can collect data that you trust without having to find more hours in the day or more staff in the budget.
Intelligent Audits
Monitor all your team members, no matter where they are:
- Use text audits to invisibly record surveyors’ flow through your surveys, capturing how much time they spend on each question.
- Use audio audits to listen in, invisibly recording audio clips at random or specific points in your surveys.
- Use speed limits to trigger invisible audio recordings if SurveyCTO detects an enumerator recording answers suspiciously fast.
- Automatically capture the survey start and end date and time, version number, and information about the device used.
Automated Quality Checks
Catch mistakes before they become costly:
- Tell SurveyCTO to automatically analyze incoming data for outliers, suspicious distributions, too many missing values, and more.
- Receive automated daily reports via email that flag critical errors, suspicious surveys, or enumerators whose responses differ significantly from the rest of the team.
Smart Questionnaire Design
Better yet, stop mistakes before they happen:
- Easily create skip patterns, no matter how complex, and eliminate any possibility of skip-pattern errors.
- Restrict allowed responses for individual questions to prevent entry of impossible or contradictory answers.
- Filter answer choices for multiple choice questions based on previous answers to prevent incorrect answer selection.
- Preload external data and use it to set default values so that enumerators don’t make mistakes re-entering information already collected earlier.
Flexible Data Export and Review
View data easily so that you know what’s happening:
- Automatically send incoming data to Google Spreadsheets or Google Fusion Tables or merge exported data with Excel spreadsheets to easily review surveys and visualize key information.
- Export GPS-tagged data to Google Earth to map geographic data and confirm where surveys were done.
- Mail merge incoming data with Microsoft Word templates so that staff can more easily review it.
Easy Back-check Management
Minimize the hassle when sending supervisors for re-surveys or back-checks:
- Use pre-loaded data to compare back-check answers to original answers on the spot.
- Use two-way data streaming to automatically select surveys for back-checks and send data from the selected surveys to back-checkers’ devices. No need to print out back-check assignments or download, export, clean, and re-upload data.