Viewpoint: High-frequency phone surveys on COVID-19: Good practices, open questions

Abstract

Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face survey data collection efforts came to a halt due to lockdowns, limitations on mobility and social distancing requirements. What followed was a surge in phone surveys to fulfill rapidly evolving needs for timely and policy-relevant microdata for understanding the socioeconomic impacts of and responses to the pandemic. Even as the face-to-face survey data collection efforts are resuming in different parts of the world with COVID-19 safety protocols, the rapidly-acquired experience with phone surveys on the part of national statistical offices and survey practitioners in low- and middle-income countries appears to have formed the foundation for phone surveys to be more commonly implemented in the post-pandemic era, in response to other shocks and as complementary efforts to face-to-face surveys. Informed by the practical experience with the high-frequency phone surveys that have been implemented with support from the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) to monitor the socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper provides an overview of options for the design and implementation of phone surveys to collect representative data from households and individuals. Further, the discussion identifies the requirements for phone surveys to be a mainstay in the toolkits of national statistical offices and the directions for future research on the design and implementation of phone surveys.

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

“…Phone surveys with national coverage had previously been rather uncommon in low-income countries and relatively little was known about their feasibility and best practices. However, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a more widespread adoption of phone surveys as an instrument of choice in low-income countries, so that phone surveys are likely to remain commonplace even after the COVID-19 pandemic, complementing F2F surveys [ 8 ].…”

“…Our paper is part of a growing literature on methodology and best practices for designing and conducting phone surveys in low- and middle-income countries, covering a range of issues including sampling [ 21 , 24 ]; survey mode [ 14 , 20 , 25 ]; survey cost, non-response, attrition, and use of incentives [ 16 , 26 – 31 ]; and questionnaire design [ 19 , 32 , 33 ]. There are also several guidebooks and synthesis reports that summarize best practices and experiences with phone surveys from before the COVID-19 pandemic [ 16 , 26 , 29 ] as well as in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic [ 8 , 14 , 32 ].…”

Collecting mortality data via mobile phone surveys: a non-inferiority randomized trial in Malawi

“…Questions about deaths might also take too long to administer. There are strict recommendations to keep the duration of MPS short [31], and eliciting mortality data about deaths with sufficient detail requires time. Existing mortality-related MPS have thus only included limited ascertainments of deaths and their circumstances.…”

Untitled

“…Our paper is part of a growing literature on methodology and best practices for designing and conducting phone surveys in low-and middle-income countries, covering a range of issues including sampling [21,24]; survey mode [14,20,25]; survey cost, non-response, attrition, and use of incentives [16,[26][27][28][29][30][31]; and questionnaire design [19,32,33]. There are also several guidebooks and synthesis reports that summarize best practices and experiences with phone surveys from before the COVID-19 pandemic [16,26,29] as well as in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic [8,14,32].…”