This list is a companion to our curated list on technical topics. It puts together our posts on issues of measurement, survey design, sampling, survey checks, managing survey teams, reducing attrition, and all the behind-the-scenes work needed to get the data needed for impact evaluations. updated through July 6, 2023
Survey Methods and Impact Evaluation during Covid-19
Impact evaluation in the time of Covid-19 Part 1
Impact evaluation during Covid-19: What should I do with my ongoing field projects?
Mobile phone surveys for understanding Covid-19 Part I: Sample and Mode
Mobile phone surveys for understanding Covid-19 Part II: Response, Quality, and Questions
Practical tips for implementing surveys during the great lockdown
Measuring how youth spend their time when schools are closed
Practical tips for remotely training enumerators
Improving targeting for mobile phone surveys: a public-private data collaboration
Measurement
Mystery clients in development research
New developments with the promises and pitfalls of subjective welfare
How to track poverty trends without good consumption data
A technology letdown: using RFID to track inventories in microenterprises
Hard measurement of soft skills
How stable are time preferences? Mixed evidence from two new studies
Challenges in counting the world’s hungry
Measuring the rate at which we discount the future: a comparison of new field-based approaches
Three new papers on measuring stuff that is hard to measure (illegal migration, corruption, political attitudes)
Measuring international mobility through where people log into commonly used websites
Trying to measure what workers actually do: the task approach to job content
Measuring entrepreneurship (Part I, Part II)
Misadventures in photographing impact
What are we learning from better measurement?
Are the Danes the happiest people in the world? Using vignettes to anchor subjective responses
The Hermeneutics of Satisfaction
Job satisfaction matters…and the measurement of job satisfaction matters
We talk a lot about empowerment, but how do we measure it?
What is the good life? Can we measure it?
You are in school. Or so you say…
Measuring consumption (through survey)
Measuring business practices in small firms
Measuring who in the household has the final say in decisions
What's new in measuring subjective expectations?
Skills and agricultural productivity
Building grit in the classroom and measuring changes in it
List experiments for sensitive questions - a methods bleg
Odds are you are measuring son preference incorrectly
False positives in sensitive survey questions
What do we measure when we measure food consumption?
Pitfalls of patient satisfaction surveys and how to avoid them
Does It Matter Who Answers the Survey to Identify Families in Poverty?
Unpacking within household interactions: the roles people take
Sex, Lies, and Measurement: Do Indirect Response Survey Methods Work? (No…)
How to Implicit Association Test?
Measuring how youth spend their time when schools are closed
Some things to think about when doing information experiments
Getting better information on property rights
Measuring fertilizer quality and measuring seed quality
Measuring agency: the quest continues
Microenterprise interventions: making it our business to know about businesses
Collecting good time use data with less cost and complexity
Time is money, but how much? Valuing time in self-employment
An easy to understand but distribution-sensitive welfare measure
Qualitative analysis with representative samples
Measuring socioemotional skills and emotion regulation in the field
Measuring harassment in the workplace
Survey design
9 pages or 66 pages? Questionnaire design’s impact on poverty proxy measurement
Dialing for data: the story of a high-frequency phone survey in Liberia
Do you agree or disagree? How to ask the question
What is the right way to pick a respondent for a household survey?
Getting to better data: talking to strangers
Getting to better data: do men say yes more often than women?
Notes from the field: collecting gender-disaggregated data in practice
Being indirect sometimes gets closer to the truth: new work on indirect elicitation surveys
Paper or plastic (using CAPI) (Part I, Part II)
When to use insiders or outsiders as survey interviewers
Impacts of being interviewed on subsequent behavior
Calling it in: using phones for repeat surveys
Notes from the field: October edition
Issues of data collection and measurement
Towards a survey methodology methodology
Electronic vs paper-based surveys: reviewing the debate
Dialing for data: enterprise edition
Is it possible to re-interview participants in a survey conducted by someone else?
If you pay your survey respondents, you might just get a different answer
Facility-based data collection - a methods bleg
Tips for collecting surveys of hard to reach populations
We ran a video survey. Here's how it worked.
How does adding more questions affect the quality of survey answers?
How participating in a baseline may affect subsequent behavior
Sampling
Using sending country surveys as a basis for sampling immigrants: a cautionary tale
Sampled social networks and household surveys
Survey checks and Data Accuracy
Checking survey quality with Benford’s law
Using Engel curves to detect underreporting of income among the self-employed
When bad people do good surveys
Surveying in Countries with Too Many Zeroes in their currency
Data corruption and mucked up stratification – problems and potential solutions
Getting to better data: who does the editing?
Economists have experiments figured out: what’s next? (hint it’s measurement) (on self-reporting)
Sifting through data to detect deliberate misreporting in pay-for-performance schemes
Notes from the field: making the most of monitoring data
Robustly wrong? New methods for cleaning survey data on incomes
Managing Survey Teams and Doing Fieldwork
Insights from 15 years of fieldwork in Thailand
Notes from the field: setting up a firm survey in Malawi
Notes from the field: how to incentivize your survey team
Doing fieldwork in conflict-afflicted areas
Some advice from survey implementers (part 1, part 2)
Research with adolescents: issues surrounding consent
Reducing Attrition
Three strikes and they are out? Persistence and reducing panel attrition among firms
Help for attrition is only a phone call away: a new bounding approach
They can run, but can they hide? Tracking respondents in longitudinal surveys
Survey attrition and freudenschade
Dealing with attrition in field experiments
Reducing attrition in phone surveys
Attrition rates typically aren't that different for the control group than the treatment group
Cost Analysis
Why don't economists do cost analysis in their impact evaluations?
Capturing cost data: a first-mile problem
Using Photos
Beyond the trite "I was there" photo - using photos and videos to communicate your research
Administrative Data
Working with administrative tax data: A how-to-get-started guide
Remote Sensing
Improving the granularity of nightlights satellite data
Expanding the usability of remote sensing data in development
Unobserved errors in Earth Observation
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