Challenges and opportunities of a paperless baseline survey in Sri Lanka.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Personal digital assistants (PDAs) have been shown to reduce costs associated with survey implementation and digitisation, and to improve data quality when compared to traditional paper based data collection. Few studies, however, have shared their experiences of the use of these devices in rural settings in Asia. This paper reports on our experiences of using a PDA device for data collection in Sri Lanka as part of a large cluster randomised control trial.

Findings

We found that PDAs were useful for collecting data for a baseline survey of a large randomised control trial (54,000 households). We found that the PDA device and survey format was easy to use by inexperienced field staff, even though the survey was programmed in English. The device enabled the rapid d

SUBMITTER: Knipe DW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4118630 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature