Training
The PMA2016/Ethiopia-R4 fieldwork training started with a two-week training of new 30 new field staff, including four new supervisors for the Oromiya region and was followed by a three-day refresher training for returning field staff. The two-week training was conducted from February 22 to March 4, 2016 and the concurrent refresher trainings were held March 9-11, 2016. For both sets of trainings, PMA2020 staff from the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health led the training, with support from Addis Ababa University School of Public Health project staff.
The first training took place at the Ethiopian Management Institute in Addis Ababa. In addition, concurrent refresher trainings in Addis Ababa and Mekele towns were held March 9-11; a total of 220 resident enumerators (REs) received training. All training participants at the two-week training were given comprehensive instruction on how to complete the household, female, and service delivery point (SDP) questionnaires. In addition to PMA2020 survey training, all participants received training on contraceptive methods by an Ethiopian obstetrician/gynecologist.
Throughout the two-week training, REs and supervisors were evaluated based on their performance on several written and phone-based assessments, mock field exercises and class participation. The training included three days of field exercises, during which participants entered a mock enumeration area (EA) to practice listing, mapping and conducting household, female and SDP interviews; recording all responses on their project phones; and submitting to a practice cloud server—a centralized data storage system. The RE trainings were conducted primarily in Amharic, whereas some small group sessions were conducted in Afan Oromiffa and Tigrigna.
The four new supervisors received additional training on how to oversee fieldwork and complete household re-interviews used to carry out random spot-checks in 10 percentage of the households interviewed by resident enumerators.
For the concurrent refresher trainings, all training participants were given instructions on survey changes to the tools since the previous round. The REs and supervisors were all evaluated based on their performance on phone-based assessments. Similar to the two-week training, the three-day refresher trainings were conducted primarily in Amharic, whereas some small group sessions were conducted in Afan Oromiffa and Tigrigna.
Data Collection & Processing
Data collection was conducted between March and April 2016. Unlike traditional paper-and-pencil surveys, PMA2020 uses Open Data Kit (ODK) Collect, an open-source software application, to collect data on mobile phones. All the questionnaires were programmed using this software and installed onto all project smartphones. The ODK questionnaire forms are programmed with automatic skip-patterns and built-in response constraints to reduce data entry errors.
The ODK application enabled REs and supervisors to collect and transfer survey data to a central ODK Aggregate cloud server. This instantaneous aggregation of data also allowed for concurrent data processing and course corrections while PMA2020 was still active in the field. Throughout data collection, central staff at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia and the data manager from the Gates Institute in Baltimore, Maryland routinely monitored the incoming data and notified field staff of any potential errors, missing data or problems found with form submissions on the central server.
The use of mobile phones combined data collection and data entry into one step; therefore, data entry was completed when the last interview form was uploaded at the end of data collection in June.
Once all data were on the server, data analysts cleaned and de-identified the data, applied survey weights, and prepared the final data set for analysis using Stata® version 14 software. The national dissemination workshop of preliminary results was held on August 26, 2016 at Elily Hotel Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.