Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey 2010

Interviewers and supervisors were initially divided into teams of five persons (one supervisor and four interviewers), making in total 50 teams for the fieldwork. Each month, 25 teams were working in the field with a workload of 10 households per interviewer. In urban areas, 4 PSUs were allocated to one team while in rural areas, 2 PSUs were allocated. The fieldwork plan was designed in order to gather around 60 households monthly per team.

For a given month, the team arrived in the village three days before the first day of the month to tend to preparatory tasks like discussing with village authorities, filling out the Household Listing Form, and thereafter sample those households to be interviewed.

The Village Form was filled out by the supervisor.

The Household Questionnaire had 16 sections that were filled out by the interviewer during the first visit to the household, and in the following four weeks according to the following scheme:

FIRST VISIT: Initial visit

WEEK 1: Education and literacy, Housing

WEEK 2: Household economic activities, Household liabilities, Household income from other sources, and other expenditures (partial non-food recall)

WEEK 3: Durable goods and other expenses, Construction activities in the past 12 months, Nutrition, Fertility and child care, Mortality

WEEK 4: Health check of children, Current economic activity, Health, HIV/AIDS, Victimization

Once the month ended, the team went back to the NIS headquarters in Phnom Penh.

Questionnaires from the same PSU was delivered to the Data Management team by the supervisor in a packet including all of the documents used and produced in the fieldwork, including maps, enumeration lists, questionnaires, diaries, etc. Before going to the villages, teams were briefed and introduced to minor adjustments of the interviewing procedure that had to be made as a result of monitoring activities and feed-back from the data processing.

The fieldwork started in Janury 2010 and was scheduled to end in December 2010.

Fifty (50) supervisors and 200 enumerators were recruited by NIS and trained for the fieldwork. The training took place in Phnom Penh and lasted three weeks for supervisors and two weeks for enumerators. Before the start of each fieldwork month, there were briefing and retraining sessions. Each fieldwork team included one supervisor and four enumerators. In urban areas one enumerator was responsible for one PSU and for interviewing 10 households, while in rural areas two enumerators were responsible for one PSU and for interviewing 20 households. In all, 125 enumerators and supervisors, divided into 25 teams, were carrying out the fieldwork at the same time. Two such team groups were formed and each team group alternated monthly.

Enumerator and Supervisor training

Initial training was provided during nine days for a group of 20-30 staff (not all were attending all the time). This training included a translation into Khmer of selected parts of the questionnaire, and a field test in a village outside Phnom Penh where the participants performed test interviews in 16 households. The experiences from this exercise were followed up during the course. The course also included general aspects on survey methodology and ways of controlling for errors. Many of the findings from this training served as input to later stages.

Prior to the start of the fieldwork intensive interviewer and supervisor training was carried out. The 200 interviewers and 50 supervisors recruited were split into two groups, each consisting of 100 interviewers and 25 supervisors. The two groups later alternated so that the first group did their fieldwork during odd survey months (i.e. November, January, March …) while the second group covered the even survey months (i.e. February, April …).

The training was designed with this in mind. Training of the first group was provided in English by a WB consultant and simultaneously interpreted in Khmer by the appointed NIS officer. The second group was trained by NIS only.

Common was that the supervisors were first trained during one week, and then jointly with their interviewers for two weeks. Before all fieldwork months the group in turn was gathered at the NIS to walk through the questionnaire and manuals in order to correct errors that were detected during the briefing sessions or the monitoring operations, and to learn how to handle any changes that were introduced to the survey instruments.