Survey Piloting

I’ve been piloting a survey for the agricultural loans—going out and asking people the survey questions before starting the survey properly in order to see if the way we are asking the questions is actually generating answers. There have been a few pitfalls.

First of all, going up to anybody’s house and asking the questions was only partially successful because most of those people hadn’t taken out loans or banked anywhere, so we couldn’t ask any of the loan history or financial literacy questions. It was preferable to go to SACCO members, but nearly all the contact information we have is out of date. Finding people is much more difficult than expected—right now I’m waiting for a woman who said she would meet us (me and Jackie, who is translating and guiding me around to people’s houses).

(random Nkokonjeru picture, just for fun)

Secondly, the survey can’t be piloted properly if Jackie, who translates for me, isn’t reading the questions just as she wrote them when she originally translated the questions. I’ve been pointing this out to Jackie, but this usually is met with the protestation that she’s asking the same question. While this may be true, there is a difference between asking the same question and reading the question exactly as it is written—which of course we hope that the people implementing the survey next month will be doing. She’s been a lot better lately, though. Today I definitely noticed her correcting herself from asking the question informally to reading exactly what she had written. This was after she launched into a long clarification of the question and I stopped the interview to ask her to write down her clarification so that future interviewers, who might not know as much about the issue as she does, can ask the question in the same way. Small improvements.

(Interlude: the woman finally showed up, just as the SACCO was closing, so we did the interview.)

Third, people do not like the way we ask questions. “What is an interest rate?” gets the answer “I know what it is.” “How many varieties of matoke do you grow?” gets a list of the varieties. How many times gets often, etc. Of course, that is the very point of a pilot survey.

(another just-for-fun Nkokonjeru picture)

My next strategy is to do the survey with people who come to make deposits. Unfortunately, I won’t get to do this until Monday, since there is a burial tomorrow afternoon for one of our board members and then Jackie will be in Entebbe, barring further surprises, Friday.