Quantitative surveys
OPM has extensive experience in the design, implementation, analysis and dissemination of quantitative surveys. Work includes supporting and strengthening existing surveys implemented routinely by statistics offices. OPM works particularly often with household surveys measuring income poverty, social indicators and rural sector statistics, in which we emphasise the development and strengthening of institutional capacity. OPM has provided such support to numerous statistics offices, with recent examples including Rwanda, Tanzania and Zanzibar, the Kyrgyz Republic, Moldova and Pakistan.
The work also includes ‘bespoke’ surveys designed to address particular policy and programme issues. These may include:
- Service delivery surveys that assess the functioning of the service provider, both at the facility level and further up the organisational chain. These surveys may examine the volume and quality of services delivered, the availability of resources at facility level and the functioning of administrative and management systems that support these services. They commonly assess user perspectives on services through user interviews.
- Expenditure tracking surveys measuring the flow of public money and other resources to service delivery units. Recent work on service delivery and expenditure tracking surveys has focussed on health and education, and includes work in Bangladesh and Mozambique.
- The design of surveys to measure the impact of particular projects and programmes across a range of sectors, covering a range of welfare measures including health and education, income poverty, agricultural production and others. Examples include the design of surveys to measure the impact of government transfers in Kenya, of community health workers in Pakistan, and an agricultural investment programme in Uganda.
OPM has the capacity to undertake or to provide support to all stages of survey design, implementation, analysis and dissemination. These include the overall design of the survey and sampling strategy, as well as designing and piloting questionnaires. OPM also manages and quality-assure fieldwork, usually contracting local survey organisations when it has responsibility for survey implementation; OPM gives great importance to field quality assurance systems to ensure data quality. OPM draws on a number of consultants in supporting data entry and data processing and is able to support most common packages.
OPM has extensive capacity for data analysis and the production of clearly written, relevant survey reports focussed on client needs. The effective dissemination of findings is essential in order to ensure that analysis meets the needs of stakeholders and that findings are used and understood. OPM uses a range of strategies to achieve this, depending on circumstances, which may include one-to-one briefings with key individuals, stakeholder presentations and workshops, summary briefing notes, websites, national media and ‘popular reports’.