Can Mobile Phone Surveys Replace House-To-House Data Collection?

This brief describes an effort to use interactive voice recognition to assess media exposure and behaviors in Ghana.

Communicate for Health and Viamo developed a survey design with three major objectives:

• Assess trends in exposure to health communication messages among the project’s three Life Stage audiences
• Assess trends in behavioral determinants and behaviors
• Evaluate the feasibility and of collecting project monitoring and evaluation data via mobile phone

Communicate for Health found that mobile phone surveys using IVR random digit dial sampling is an alternative or supplemental data collection method for social and behavior change monitoring in low resource settings. In Ghana, Communicate for Health found that the methodology is suitable for reaching populations with high access to mobile phones, especially people 35 and younger, from urban or peri-urban areas, and males.

Source: FHI360

Date of Publication: January 9, 2020