Last week we sent the survey to the 57 sampled districts for our study. As I mentioned in previous posts, we are sending the survey digitally to the 57 district planners who will act as our data collectors and gather responses from their district health officer and/or district health team members.
So far we have about 11 districts who have submitted their responses, thanks to the efforts of Ms. Edith Kangabe at NPC. Edith is a principal in the Policy & Planning division at NPC and thus regularly interacts with district planners in all of Uganda's 136 districts. So she has been supporting our work by first calling all the 57 planners to get their emails so we can send the survey and the directions, then calling to remind them to submit the survey. It takes a bit of effort to get the responses, and we are not expecting to get all 57 districts to submit the survey, however this method of data collection is still way more cost-effective than if we had to go to the field to collect responses (which would be impossible on the budget I have for this summer).
It was also not possible for me to limit the number of survey submissions per district, so although they are supposed to only submit one form per district, some districts have submitted 2-3 forms. We will likely have to follow-up with these districts in case there are any disagreements in responses across the 2-3 respondents, since we need one value per district for our analysis.
Otherwise I am working on analyzing the data as it comes in so we can quickly turnaround the results once we have all the surveys. The data cleaning process is always more labor intensive than you think! I will download the survey responses into an excel file and then clean the data using R. Once I write the code, I can re-run it when we have additional survey responses.
Now back to work!