RURAL BANGLADESH - PreventionWeb

Socio-Economic Profiles of WFP Operational Areas and Beneficiaries
2.5 DATA ENTRY & PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS
The quantitative data entry process commenced as the questionnaires were collected from
the field, after supervisors from each team had begun the process of cleaning the
questionnaires for mistakes. MITRA managed the data entry process, applying a doubleentry
system in order to minimize data entry errors. After entering all of the questionnaires
into the Excel format, MITRA cleaned the data and then compiled the files into SPSS in
order to facilitate analysis. TANGO ensured that all of the files were clean and logical prior
to commencing the analysis process.
2.5.1 Cleaning of the Food, Asset, Savings and Expenditure Data
Food consumption, expenditure, and asset data collected in household surveys are invariably
subject to a host of potential errors, including household reporting errors, enumerator
recording errors, and data entry errors. The raw data from this survey were subject to a
thorough cleaning so as to avoid any influence of major errors on the estimates of dietary
diversity, meal frequencies, per-capita household income, and asset ownership. These
variables are also used in the Principal Component Analysis to cluster socioeconomic
categories. Data cleaning required three stages.
First, the variables were cleaned manually by examination for outliers at both ends of the
distribution separately for each WFP Priority Zones. Detected outlying unit values of
particular data for that specific observation were set to missing. In the second stage, all
values greater than three standard deviations were set to missing for the specific observation.
Applying these two cleaning methods, approximately 1.2 percent of observations were
identified as outliers. In the final stage all missing values were replaced by the median
values.
In the end the cleaning process whittled away approximately 100 completed survey
questionnaires, resulting in a final sample total of 2,661 households comprising 12,682
individuals.
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