Representativeness of individual-level data in COVID-19 phone surveys: Findings from Sub-Saharan Africa.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic has created urgent demand for timely data, leading to a surge in mobile phone surveys for tracking the impacts of and responses to the pandemic. Using data from national phone surveys implemented in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria and Uganda during the pandemic and the pre-COVID-19 national face-to-face surveys that served as the sampling frames for the phone surveys, this paper documents selection the biases in individual-level analyses based on phone survey data. In most cases, individual-level data are available only for phone survey respondents, who we find are more likely to be household heads or their spouses and non-farm enterprise owners, and on average, are older and better educated vis-a-vis the general adult population. These differences are the result of uneven

SUBMITTER: Brubaker J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8598049 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature