Training
The PMA2015/Ghana-R4 fieldwork refresher training started on April 16, 2015, with a training of 15 field supervisors and 3 central staff. 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 Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology (KNUST) School of Medicine project staff. The one-day training of field supervisors on April 16th focused on updates to the survey protocol since the previous round. The field supervisors then became the trainers for the four subsequent resident enumerator (RE) refresher training sessions that also took place in January 2014. Four groups of training were organized for REs. Four groups of training were organized for REs. Two training workshops were held in Kumasi - the first for REs from Volta, Brong Ahafo and Eastern regions and the second for REs from Ashanti region. A third training was organized in Tamale-UDS for Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions, and a fourth in Accra for REs from Western region, Central region, and Greater Accra.
As this was a refresher training for continuing staff, the training focused on a handful of newly added questions to the household questionnaire and review of the service delivery point (SDP) questionnaire and review of survey content and protocol.
Throughout the trainings, REs and supervisors were evaluated based on their performance on several written and phone-based assessments, practical field exercises and class participation. The RE trainings were conducted primarily in English, whereas small group sessions were all conducted in the local languages predominantly spoken in the selected EAs.
Supervisors received additional training prior to and after the RE training to further strengthen their supervisory skills, including instruction on conducting re-interviews, carrying out random spot checks, and engaging communities through local leaders.
Data Collection and Processing
Data collection was conducted between May and September 2015. 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 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 KNUST and the data manager at the Gates Institute in Baltimore 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 September.
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. Data analysis for the national dissemination of preliminary findings was conducted between September and October 2015.