Surveys

We are pretty much finished with the microfinance-style project we've been working on. I submitted the final report along with the monitoring tools we developed. I think we've learned something about writing surveys. We've created about 9000 of them since we've been here. Since our time is limited, and since we wanted to create stuff that CASP would still be able to use after we leave, and since they don't have the enough staff to have someone dedicated to program monitoring and evaluation, we've tried to create surveys that get at the most important information in the simplest way possible. I think we've gotten better.

Our first one had a lot of short-answer questions. When we got it back we realized that it's not easy to encode a bunch of short-answers. Whenever possible, we've been trying to use multiple choice questions, and ones that can be answered with a simple yes/no or a number, such as “How much money does your family spend on health care each year?” or “Did you visit a hospital in the past year without filing a claim with the insurance company? If so, why: A. I didn't know I had insurance, B. I don't trust the insurance scheme, C. I don't know how to file a claim, D. Other reason: ______ “ That way it's easy to report.

We've also been perfecting our skills in using Lickert scales. That's the “strongly agree, agree, no opinion, disagree, strongly disagree” stuff. This way every answer had a numerical value, and if you set it up right, you can add the values to get a total. It's a useful tool (plus, the guy's from Michigan!). For example, the microfinance scheme had the objectives of helping the beneficiaries (all women) become more empowered and develop entrepreneurial skills. But those things are kind of vague and more difficult to measure than a straightforward objective like raising the household income by 50%. So part of our monitoring for that program uses the Lickert scale to get a score for how “entrepreneurial” a beneficiary is, or how “empowered.” We looked for sort of industry standards for these things. The definition for entrepreneurial skills is based on information from the Grameen Bank, which was the first to do microcredit, and the Microfinance Gateway, which is a good resource for all kinds of information on the subject. The definition for empowerment comes from a World Bank report on empowerment measures. So for empowerment, each item on the empowerment gets at an aspect of empowerment. Here is that scale:

Please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with the following statements by circling a number:
1: Strongly Agree, 2: Agree, 3: No Opinion, 4: Disagree, 5: Strongly Disagree

1. The number of people I interact with on a weekly basis has increased since I began this project.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

2. My husband and I determine the size of our family together.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

3. If I disagree with my husband, I usually tell him.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

4. I am actively involved in a religious, political, or community organization.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

5. The decisions I make tend to result in the desired outcome.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

6. I do not have a say in how my household's income is spent.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

7. I do not have the able to improve my family's quality of life.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

8. I usually do not vote in local, state, and national national elections.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

9. I am not involved in our family’s decision making.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

10. I do not feel like an active member of my community.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

Each item is worth 1-5 points. So a score of 50 would be “fully empowered” and a score of 10 would be “not at all empowered” The CASP social workers only have to give the survey every 6 months, and see if the scores improve over the course of the 3-year program. Such a simple survey wont establish causality, but it's easy to use, and can at least show a correlation. If there's no improvement in entrepreneurship or empowerment after 3 years, it would be a good sign that the program failed in meeting those objectives.

We also gave them tools for tracking the women's costs and revenue associated with the program, and an excel sheet that they can easily enter data into which automatically generates a report each month. Here is a copy of the full report if you want to see it.

Tomorrow morning we're going to Mumbai. We made a map of the places we want to see on google. I don't know if we'll have time to see everything since we're only going to be there 2 days, but I think it will still be fun, even it it's raining nonstop!