Interview

Definition of households

This concept is explained in details in the (Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses.

The concept of household include those persons who live together and have communal arrangements concerning subsistence and other necessities of life, such as eating together. This implies therefore 2 important arrangement;

• The household dwelling concept regards all persons living in a housing unit as belonging to the same household. According to this concept, there is one household per occupied housing unit. Therefore, the number of occupied housing units and the number of households occupying them are equal and the locations of the housing units and households are identical.

• The housekeeping concept, that is to say, a person or a group of two or more persons living together who make common provision for food or other essentials for living, with or without combining with any other person to form part of a multi-person household. The persons in the group may pool their resources and have a common budget; they may be related or unrelated persons or a combination of persons both related and unrelated.

Relations with UNHCR cases as per Registration

The UNHCR case is the equivalent of Nuclear household. NHCR case are used a basis for large part of the assistance delivery.

When surveying Households, it is important to make connection between the households and the cases:

• Case 1: One single family nucleus which then equals a UNHCR case. In this case both dwelling & housekeeping are de facto shared.
• Case 2: An extended household with two or more than two UNHCR cases. In this case, the surveyor will record if dwelling & housekeeping are effectively shared between cases.
• Case 3: A composite household with two or more than two UNHCR cases, as well as additional members, such as host communities individuals. In this case, the surveyor will record if dwelling & housekeeping are effectively shared between cases, as well as with the members that are not part of the cases.

The main point is to allow for understanding the allocation of expenses (housekeeping & dwelling) between cases that would be grouped together in the same extended or composite household. The allocation coudl be based for instance on:

• One case covering for all other cases;
• One case covering for non-UNHCR case members;
• Allocation based on number of individuals in each case;
• Allocation based on number of adults individuals in each case;
• Allocation based on number of individuals that get an income in each case, etc.

Face to Face interview

Advantages:

• Accurate screening. Face-to-face interviews help with more accurate screening. The individual being interviewed is unable to provide false information during screening questions such as gender, age, or race.
• Keep focus. The interviewer is the one that has control over the interview and can keep the interviewee focused and on track to completion.
  
• Capture emotions and behaviors. Face-to-face interviews can no doubt capture an interviewee’s emotions and behaviors. Interviewer opinion can be a very good predictor of vulneraility for instance

Disadvantages:

• Cost. Cost is a major disadvantage for face-to-face interviews. They require a staff of people to conduct the interviews, which means there will be personnel costs.
• Quality of data by interviewer. The likelihood of the entire interviewing staff having those skills is low. Some interviewers may also have their own biases that could impact the way they input responses.
  
• Reluctance: Women and the elderly may feel more physically vulnerable than men and younger people. So the first of these groups may be more reluctant to allow a stranger into their homes for an interview, whereas they may be willing to talk with an interviewer over the telephone.
  
• Limit sample size. The size of the sample is limited to the size of your interviewing staff, the area in which the interviews are conducted, and the number of qualified respondents within that area.
  
• Higher level of “unknown” reponse are boserved and were demonstrated by studies: “There is more item non-response in in-person interviews and that non-response is being driven by people with low levels of cognitive skills. The fact that there was an increased rate of correct responses to fact-based questions in the in-person interviews compared to the self-completed ones – with the concomitant decrease in “don’t knows” – suggests that it is not the case that people are randomly guessing in the self-completed modes. The in-person interview seems to keep people from answering even when they know the correct response”.

Telephone interview through Call Center

Telephone surveys may provide a good alternative, but we would advise use of a larger sample.

Advantages:

• Increasing rates of telephone coverage,
• Low cost of telephone surveys relative to face-to-face interviews,
• speed with which telephone surveys can be conducted.

Disadvantages:

• people without telephones can only participate in face-to-face surveys. The systematic exclusion of this latter group from telephone surveys may introduce bias if this group is both sufficiently sizable and also sufficiently different from telephone owners. A
• Young adults are more transient and less settled than middle or older age adults, the former individuals may be less likely to own telephones and therefore may be under-represented in telephone samples.
  
• Telephone survey responses manifest more social desirability response bias than the Internet survey;
• Risk of selecting random people who lost/changed their phone.

Self administered with online quota survey

The emergence of Internet surveys in the 1990s threatened the dominance of telephone surveys due to their advantages in terms of cost and speed. Indeed, Internet surveys soon appeared as a promising alternative to prior methods; nevertheless, there are still problems with the coverage and, as a result, with the representativeness of online surveys.

Scrolling versus Paging, SMS versus E-mail Invitations have an impact on response rates in web surveys completed on personal computers. Scrolling design leads to significantly faster completion times, lower (though not significantly lower) breakoff rates, fewer technical problems, and higher subjective ratings of the questionnaire. SMS invitations are more effective than e-mail invitations in mobile web surveys.

Advantages:

• Lower cost and higher speed;
• Visual, interactive, and flexible;
• Do not require interviewers to be present and busy people – often educated and well-off – who systematically ignore taking part in a telephone survey are willing to answer questions posted on their computer screens;
• Sutdies found that Internet-based surveys increased the reporting on sensitive information, compared to computer-assisted telephone interview.

Disadvantages:

• under representation of uneducated population group: panel: one can reach only those who are online; one can reach only those who agree to become part of a panel; not all those who are invited respond; and, those who sign up for online panels are rather young and male.

Interactive Voice Response & Short text Message (SMS) Pools

IVR (Interactive Voice Response) can be used with a Free tool #.

Advantages:

• Accessible to illiterate and in multiple language
• Can support a lot of concurrent connection

Disadvantages:

• Technology need to be purchased
• Can not process to complex information

SMS gateway: FrontlineSMS has been already used under the project name Ascend and tested by UNHCR in Costa Rica

Specific constraints:

• 4 options max per questions
• concise questions, simple words
• describe action then press key
• caller should be informed on how much to go to complete the survey

Advantages:

• Lower cost and higher speed.

Disadvantages:

• only fit for short questions & short survey (less than five questions)
• Risk of selecting random people who lost/changed their phone