Now that we've talked in detail about different ways to select interviewers, we're just going to do a brief reminder of what you need to be keeping in mind as you go through and you select your interviewers. When you're in the process of recruiting your field workers, you're going to likely receive a good number of CVs. One of the things you'll be looking for will be previous expertise, or previous experience. We also recommend not using that necessarily as an exclusion criteria. Some people might not have done this particular kind of work before, but that actually can mean you get an opportunity to train them and train them specifically, you don't have to break any pre-existing bad habits. Previous experience is nice, it shouldn't necessarily preclude you from hiring someone. Then in that first step, you're going to hire and over hire, so about 10 percent more people than you know that you'll need for your survey to make sure that if anything happens, if things come up, people for some reason can't complete the work, it's always a good idea to have a pool of people who are already trained, who are ready to go for data collection if need be later down the road. Once you've made that selection with that oversampling, and it's also very important to make sure that you communicate ahead of time that you are doing this because otherwise that can cause a lot of frustration down the road. The next step will be to do your in-class training. During the in-class training, you, your team of facilitators should be keeping notes about how people are doing. You should also record what grades people are getting on the quizzes. One big selection criteria will be how people behave in classwork and how they do with handling the CAPI, how they do with handling the tablet, and more generally, how they seem to be performing in the role-plays that you have them doing, how they perform in class participation, all the things that you can get out of the classroom experience. Make sure to keep notes as you go along so that you don't forget when it's time to make those decisions. You have to remember that, especially if you're doing data collection in some more rural areas, it's a pretty rigorous, time consuming endeavor, so you want to make sure your data collectors are going to actually be available for the period of time that you need them for. There's not much you can do beyond just make sure to ask that question, but do plan to have some people available as backup. At the end of your training, you're going to do some field practice where you go into the field and basically do everything as if it were the actual data collection moment and that's a really great way to know how people interact with interviewees in the field. There's no replacement for that in-person interaction because someone can be really excellent in class, get the best grades, be really familiar with the knowledge, but then might not have really good interviewing skills and vice versa, someone who maybe was middle of the road or not doing so great in terms of participation of classroom evaluations can turn out to be a shining star in terms of the way that they put interviewees at ease and the way that they're capable of explaining the questions, just kind of interpersonal skill set that is really difficult to measure by any metric other than witnessing it in the field. Make sure to be as present as you can during that field practice, make sure that the whole team is there and takes notes and compares notes at the end of the day to make sure that everybody's reaching the same conclusion and that these interpersonal skills which really have a very substantial impact on your ultimate data quality aren't being overlooked. Once you've had all of those pieces of information, another consideration you'll need to keep in mind is the gender and the language considerations. Remember that on top of doing all the fieldwork and the logistics and making sure that people can be comfortable in these sometimes very rigorous and intense workdays and workloads, they also have to be able to communicate clearly and comfortably with the interviewees. That has some implications in terms of language. Are people actually as able to speak the language as they may have claimed that they were on a CV or just verbally. If you can assess that before even recruiting them into your pool of data collectors that you're training, so either by doing a short conversation in the language or maybe hiring someone to come in and do those short conversations, that's ideal. If you're not able to do that, then definitely pay attention during that field practice because the language distribution is a very big criteria. If you don't have interviewers who can speak the language that the interviewees speak, then that language barrier precludes you from collecting any data at all. If they don't speak the language as well as the claim to speak it, that means you can collect some data, but the quality of that data is going to be very questionable because there's no way to assess whether the interviewee actually was able to understand the question or the answer options. Be really mindful of the distribution of languages in your teams. Also, if it's not possible to have everyone be fluent in all of the languages, when you're creating your teams, make sure to sprinkle out. Make sure that if you have perhaps at least one person per team who can speak one specific language, then on the fields, the team leader can manage that person to make sure that whenever there is a need for that language, that person can go and give the interview. There are ways to manage if you don't have anyone being perfectly fluent, but definitely having some people who are actually as fluent as they claim to be is key. Then lastly, gender can be a very important criteria to keep in mind. The radar questionnaire include some very sensitive questions. In some settings, it is not appropriate for a man and a woman to be discussing these kind of topics. In some cases, if you are doing the reproductive questions for men as well, typically it's better received that a woman ask this to a man than a man ask this to a woman. There is an advantage in most settings to have female interviewers as much as possible. When making your decisions, try to prioritize all of these criteria. Think about how people are performing in the classroom, how people are performing during fieldwork. Think about the language distribution, the gender distribution, and using all of these information in consultation with your whole team, that is how you make the selection of the final group of interviewees that you will go to the field with at the beginning of your data collection.
