How to use the survey

This page provides information on how to use the survey module.

 

We aim to understand how the economy in low- and middle-income countries has been affected by COVID-19. The short survey module described here collects information about the economic consequences of lockdowns for business owners, workers, and farmers.

 

Here are several key points for those using the survey:

 

Core-module for all respondents and occupation-specific modules

The survey module consists of four different parts. It starts with a core module relevant to business owners, workers, and farmers. Depending on the occupation, there are then separate modules for these three categories. After the occupation-specific module, the core-module includes a few further questions regarding phone numbers, email addresses and social media so follow up surveys can be carried out.

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“I cannot include all the questions, can I still contribute?” –priority questions

We are aware that implementers have different constraints in terms of including questions from this module. To make the results most comparable across studies, we have marked priority questions in orange in column A for each module. If you are interested in contributing to this initiative, making sure that you can incorporate these questions, would be very valuable.

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If your sample is very homogeneous (e.g. firms from the same sector and of similar size), and you plan to roll it out to thousands of respondents, we encourage you to roll out all the survey module, but to a small fraction of the sample (e.g. 200 firms).

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“I already know the answer to one of the questions – do I need to include it?”

Ideally, the baseline information will be comparable between studies. If you already have information about certain respondent characteristics, such as their occupation, you generally don’t have to ask about this again. However, if the characteristics are changing over time (such as income) or questions from a previous survey identified something a bit different, send us an email and we will find the most sensible solution.