Conducting Surveys on Disability: A Comprehensive Toolkit

during the verification of the questionnaires, it did become clear
that certain themes needed to be included in various consecutive
sessions.
• Mental Disability (Mental Illness and Intellectual
Disability). This aspect of disability is a challenge in any
training, not only those related to survey. As time and
security constraints increased during the fieldwork of
the NDSA, the effort and patience that were required
to detect these ‘hidden’ forms of disability also
deteriorated.
• Gender Issues: the need for a further booster training
session in this aspect is also recommended, as with
time, the common beliefs and attitudes towards women
in general, and women with disability in particular
re-surface. For the NDSA this was even more salient
as in certain regions, where long days of travel were
required, families would not allow the women to go. The
male surveyors then had to carry out all the interviews,
sometimes across closed doors…
• Sampling Procedures: As the sampling of the NDSA was
a tedious task, there was a tendency to cut corners when
the households in the clusters were too far apart or when
another village needed to be included to complete the
required 30 households per cluster. Survey teams need to
be reminded of the importance of this step. In the NDSA,
the researchers also informed the teams that random
checks of clusters would be carried out.
• Place of the Interviewee with Disability. As time and
fatigue wear out the surveyors, the efforts required to
interview people with very severe and multiple disability
also deteriorated. As a result, in cases where the person
with disability cannot answer for him/herself and the
caretaker needs to be interviewed, the actual respondent
gets ignored. The surveyors should not forget that the
main focus remains the person with disability and he/she
needs to be present during the interview and included and
acknowledged as often as possible.
The Challenge Faced During the
NDSA
The challenge that we faced on the field was the need to
strike the balance between tackling dangerous situations
with regards to security of the teams and the quality of
the interview situation.
In fact, in certain regions bad security made it impossible
to stay in a cluster for more than a day (the fact of
returning to the same location increasing the risk of an
attack). However, the surveyors were required to remain
patient during the sensitive questions and reformulate
when the interviewee did not understand the terms and
not rush the interview.
We realise that in certain cases security considerations
did take precedence...
• Final Questions. The NDSA questionnaire was a lengthy
one and the most sensitive questions, those related to
ill-treatment for instance, were asked at the end so that
they did not influence the rest of the answers. However,
surveyors may have had a tendency to rush through
the final questions. Booster sessions can also look at
maintaining a patient and respectful attitude till the very
end of the interview.
De-Briefing Sessions for the Surveyors
Lastly, it is essential to organise de-briefing sessions with the
survey team that have been on the field for long stretches of
time. These sessions are aimed at creating an opportunity for the
surveyors to express their frustrations and thoughts with regards
to their experiences during the fieldwork. The teams invariably
will be faced with difficult situations on the field, be it security or
dealing with the expectations of people, their living conditions,
their frustrations... It is important to create a time and space for
these experiences to be heard and discussed.
Training of the Survey Team
39