JPAL Researcher Resources

Good general advice on CAPI, including a comparison of SurveyCTO vs ODK (see Table 1)

https://www.povertyactionlab.org/resource/survey-programming

IPA recommendations

Public resources: SurveyCTO vs. ODK, What Android device should you buy?. Generally speaking, ODK Docs or SurveyCTO Docs cover what we need. We also have some public Stata programs we have built for SurveyCTO data, such as the Data Management System which you can learn easily through our Wiki exercise.

We do ask all staff to kick off with SurveyCTO's own very basic training

On SurveyCTO programming best practices, we also tend to point people to public resources, like the SurveyCTO docs and IPA's GitHub. We will be posting new SurveyCTO templates on our GitHub in the next few months as well.

World Bank DIME

• Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI): https://dimewiki.worldbank.org/Computer-Assisted_Personal_Interviews_(CAPI)

  • Hardware recommendations: https://dimewiki.worldbank.org/Computer-Assisted_Personal_Interviews_(CAPI)#Hardware

  • Software comparison: https://dimewiki.worldbank.org/Computer-Assisted_Personal_Interviews_(CAPI)#Software

  • Questionnaire Programming: https://dimewiki.worldbank.org/Questionnaire_Programming

    • Presentation on programming an electronic survey: https://osf.io/z45uw

    • Specific workflow using SurveyCTO: https://dimewiki.worldbank.org/SurveyCTO_Programming

    • Excerpt of Handbook on advantages of tablet-based surveys: https://worldbank.github.io/dime-data-handbook/acquisition.html#using-electronic-survey-features-to-enhance-data-quality

  • iefieldkit Stata tools for primary data collection:

    • Webpage: https://dimewiki.worldbank.org/Iefieldkit

    • Github site: https://github.com/worldbank/iefieldkit/

  • SurveyCTO coding practices: https://dimewiki.worldbank.org/SurveyCTO_Coding_Practices

OpenDataKit

• Ayse Ercumen notes on ODK: Ayse Ercumen ODK Manuals.pdf

• ODK documentation: https://docs.getodk.org/

  • See especially "Getting Started" page, which links to information on how to set up your own free server: https://docs.getodk.org/getting-started/

• ruODK R client to access and parse data from ODK Central: https://docs.ropensci.org/ruODK/index.html

• Statistics for Sustainable Development blog post on programming with ODK, "How to get data out of ODK by writing code": https://stats4sd.org/blog/64

• Open Data Kit R API (although has not been updated in 3 years): https://github.com/rapidsurveys/odkr

• ODK R package (non-official): https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/odk/index.html

• ODK Stata package odkmeta (from IPA): "Create a do-file to import ODK data", https://github.com/PovertyAction/odkmeta

• IPA repositories:

  • https://github.com/PovertyAction/odkmergerepeats

  • https://github.com/PovertyAction/transcribe_survey

• Free options from Amazon AWS:

  • 12 months free

  • Always free

SurveyCTO

SurveyCTO seems to be the IPA default so most of IPA's templates, etc., are for SurveyCTO.

• Free, limited "community subscription": https://www.surveycto.com/community-contract/

Community subscriptions come with all the features of the paid subscription plan while providing just the right limits for your “sandbox”: unlimited users and devices, 1 team, 10 forms, 200 submissions per month, and 200 MB of storage.

Subscribers can create and deploy forms, monitor and explore data in seconds with our built-in Data Explorer, use features like automated quality checks, and test our APIs and integrations with external software. They can access an extensive suite of help documentation and sample forms, and utilize the SurveyCTO Support Center for additional peer support.

• SurveyCTO docs: https://docs.surveycto.com/

  • Using Stata: https://docs.surveycto.com/05-exporting-and-publishing-data/01-overview/11.using-stata.html

  • Integrating with Stata: https://docs.surveycto.com/05-exporting-and-publishing-data/02-exporting-data-with-surveycto-desktop/06.using-stata.html

  • scto Stata package: https://github.com/surveycto/stata-scto

  • rsurveycto R package: https://www.surveycto.com/analysis-reporting/survey-data-in-r-using-the-rsurveycto-package/

• IPA has several repositories and other resources relevant to SurveyCTO. See https://github.com/orgs/PovertyAction/repositories for all IPA repositories. A few of the SurveyCTO-specific items:

  • SurveyCTO templates: "IPA's templates based on SurveyCTO's CATI Starter kit", https://github.com/PovertyAction/SurveyCTO-Templates

  • ipacheckscto: "Stata command for checking best practices in a SurveyCTO xlsform", https://github.com/PovertyAction/ipacheckscto

  • SurveyCTO split https://povertyaction.github.io/guides/cleaning/rawdatamanagement/selectmultiple/