The 1995/1996 Household Income, Expenditure - (PDF, 101 mb ...

with recommendations for improvement. 6 The HIECS had intended to make full
use of this quality control team but by survey launch the head of the unit
had retired, and the unit's staff had dwindled to less than 10 part-timers.
The responsibility for controlling common and recurrent errors therefore
passed to the core processing team, which was already burdened with analysis
and tabulation plans. Quality control through valuative investigation and
operations research have never been standardized for production surveys at
CAPMAS.
The following outlines the main HIECS processing phases exposed to
evaluation, roughly in production schedule order.
LD.1 Evaluation of the Pre-test (July-August, 1995)7
During the month of July 1995, CAP MAS pre-tested the HIECS
questionnaire for its ability to elicit relevant, timely and accurate responses
from a sample of 100 households in three shiakhaatjvillages in Cairo and Giza.
The pilot questionnaire was expected to uncover inconsistencies in all phases
of HIECS survey operations; to permit estimates of costs and components of
sampling variance: and to provide opportunities to test data processing,
different versions of questions and questionnaire formats, and the feasibility
of certain questions. This experience was documented in a paper
concentrating on the sources of potential inaccuracies in the practice of
survey data collection. The intention of the paper was to make mid-level
management aware of potential data collection problems before they became
entrenched. Given the benefit of hindsight, we may now evaluate the
accuracy of expectations about potential bias which the pre-test revealed.
As a result of the pre-test, a new primary instrument was discussed
and designed, formatted, finalized and printed. This new questionnaire was
easier to follow schematically, and it incorporated critical changes to cognitive
data capture procedures. The demographic section was changed to be much
more attentive to Egyptian and international standard employment and labor
force definitions: the information in the education section was expanded to
incorporate a number of USAID-collaborative research concerns; the housing
section was changed to allow for housing services cost imputation and
comprehensive housing services quality correlates; the income sections were
streamiined; many of the expenditure sections were changed to reflect up-todate
subsidies policies, market conditions, and experience with the statistical
significance of detailed classifications by cells.
The pretest provided evidence that the production survey data quality
would vary due to common sources of nonsampling error: variable local
conditions, variable interviewer performance, and varying degrees of
6 Rowland (1996), p. 12. The report's actual findings were hardly as
ambitious.
7 This is a distillation of Cardiff (1995).
1.14
8 In the sense of providing a benchmark to maximize the accuracy and
minimize the cost of the total survey design by optimizing the balance between
sampling and non-sampling error.