In this lesson, we're going to discuss some considerations as you move forward with selecting your interviewers. A good rule of thumb is to include at least 10% more interviewers than you think you'll need for your survey itself. This includes team leaders and supervisors, you want to make sure when you're in the process of recruiting people to attend your data collector training, that you're communicating this fact. That there will be a selection made at the end of the training. In that general vein, you also want to make sure that your data collectors get paid for the training time even if they don't make the final selection. So if you're asking people to do this training, it's a good idea to make sure that they get compensated for their time. You can keep the people that you end up not selecting for your data collection as replacements for the data collectors who for whatever reason can't complete the field work. So you will have this pool of people who have been trained who are familiar with your survey, who have done the field practice are ready to go if you lose some data collectors along the way. To select your interviewers, you will want to first similarly to what you do for essentially any other job, is to create a call for applications and share that in appropriate networks. Typically there will be at least one institution in a country, who is familiar with carrying out these kind of surveys and they might have some good suggestions as to where to communicate and share your call for applications. You'll then want to review your CVs very carefully, but you do want to be mindful that previous experience while it is generally a positive thing and something that you'd want to look for, it's not a guarantee of performance. Some people who don't have any experience or have very little experience might actually be great data collectors, as long as you provide them with adequate and sufficient training. Similarly, some people who have had previous experience, may not have had received high quality training and/or supervision previously. And in that case it might actually be more difficult for them to follow your survey's methodology. Sometimes it's better to be able to implement good habits in someone who doesn't have any than to try to correct habits that are less than desirable, from previous experiences, as you move forward with selecting your interviewers. Some additional considerations to keep in mind is if you're planning to do your survey in an area where a specific language's spoken, you need to make sure that your interviewers actually speak that language. So you might want to to prioritize the inclusion of speakers of those languages that language or those languages. If it's at all possible, try to assess those language skills yourself, what constitutes being able to speak a language can be very relative. So if possible, try to make sure to either assess those language skills yourself, if you do speak that language. If you don't try to find a colleague or a local person who does in order to help you kind of assess what language skills people actually have. Some of the questionnaire has some very very sensitive information being collected. For example, anything around family planning or around childbirth, and in many settings, these are questions that are only appropriate for women to ask other women. In some cases this is not considered, something that's appropriate for a woman to speak with a man. So make sure to be familiar with your context enough, to make sure that your team has an appropriate gender distribution, for collecting these sensitive data. In some settings that might mean that only women are appropriate to hire as data collectors. Beyond just the question of asking those questions and being comfortable in answering them, there is also an additional consideration around asking for people of different genders to be in private areas to carry out the interview. So really get familiar with your context with the culture, etc to know what is appropriate and what is not appropriate to do. In some settings there might also be a perception that women cannot do field work. Field work is a very physically demanding, very rigorous exercise that requires walking for long distances, sometimes in heat, sometimes through water, it's very physically demanding. And sometimes the argument that this is perhaps too difficult for women or maybe too dangerous for women, this isn't always necessarily true. Women similarly to men can be excellent data collectors, excellent team leaders, as well as excellent supervisors. So make sure to take any sort of gendered limitation around the capacity of women to do certain types of work, with a grain of salt. Over the course of the training, you will want to have multiple written quizes, focusing on the material that you've covered during the lectures. You'll also want to have one final exam at the end of the training that covers everything from A to Z. To really make sure that your data collectors have understood all of the material that you wanted them to get during the classroom portion of your training. You'll also want to record along the way, any sort of leadership qualities in the participants. Specifically what you're looking for is the ability to listen, ability to think critically, ability to make some decisions, manage team dynamics, paying attention to details, motivating a team, etc. We really want to clarify that extra version or over assertiveness or dominating the conversation without giving any space for others to express themselves, none of those are actually leadership skills. Those are just the people who might be the loudest won't necessarily be the best leaders at any level of your leadership decision making steps. You'll also really want to pay very close attention during fieldwork practice to see how people behave in the field. Again, there's really no replacement for that field work practice, it can lead to surprises, both positive and negative relative to how people perform in a more academic classroom setting. Generally you will select your supervisors from the pool of the training participants. In some cases, you might have supervisors that are selected ahead of time. That will be when they're kind of regular go to people that institutions are familiar with and want to use as supervisors. Regardless of how you select your supervisors, you want to make sure that you have enough of them for your survey's needs. Anyone who is selected to be a team leader or a supervisor of any sort needs to have strong survey content knowledge. So they need to be very familiar with the survey itself, the questionnaire, the context etc, as well as some very good interviewing skills. And then on top of that, you want to add on some leadership skills and some management skills which will actually be the most important for carrying out successfully a supervisor role. Again, anyone who's hired to be a supervisor should attend the data collector training to make sure that they are exposed to the same information that the people they'll be managing have received. By the time you're ready to start your field practice, you should already have a short list of candidates that you think would be a good fit for the team leader role. So you create that short list from the results from your written exams, as well as from your ongoing in class interventions. You should try to have at least one field practice day, where you create practice teams and you assign all of the candidates that you're considering, the role of a team leader, or of a supervisor. You'll then want to make sure to keep a close eye on how things go assess them along the way during the field practice. And, you want to be as transparent as possible in your process for selection, you don't want to appear to be favoring people unjustly. There's a lot to be said here about human interactions, group dynamics, etc. And all of these are particularly important, as you are getting ready to go into this data collection exercise, which is long, it's rigorous. So you want to make sure that people are feeling motivated and engaged in order to have high quality data. And in order to do that, you need to make sure that you're being as mindful of group dynamics as possible.
