TL;DR: we’ve implemented on ODK Collect the Chilean National Employment
Survey, and tomorrow we’re going to show it to the national directress of
the Chilean National Statistics Institute, towards a future national
implementation.
Hi, my name is Hans Rojas.
I work in the Chilean National Statistics Institute, at the Tarapacá Region
office, in Iquique, Chile. My team have been working in the last two to
three months towards an implementation of the Chilean National Employment
Survey. It uses a long questionnaire, with lots of conditional jumps
between questions. You can see the main questionnaire here:
We used KoboForm to write the questions, and when it crashed (i don’t know,
maybe the form has too many questions, or it crashed because we used three
repeat groups), we used notepad++. We’ve tested with the interviewers,
using some smartphones, tablets, and they like it. It’s almost finished. We
have to work on some complex cases, to try to improve the questionnaire.
Now we have implemented this on some test phones and tablets. Soon, we will
test the server software, then we will look the current Institute
procedures to link this system with the current paper-based system (we want
them to be complementary, it will be necessary to continue with the
paper-based survey)
The National Statistics Institute have been surveying with mobile devices
for some time, but almost all efforts have ended on failure. Maybe the
problem is related to the devices (those ugly Trimble PDAs); or maybe the
problem is the software, or the developers, who usually program kinda
separated from the interviewers, the main users of the software.
Now, we are working with the ODK platform… and now we have a complete
questionnaire on a device… in two months.. with only one main developer
(with lots of input from an ex interviewer).
Tomorrow, we will show it to the national directress of the Institute. I’m
hoping for a good acceptance of our work, and her future support, which
will be necessary when we get to show this at the headquarters, in Santiago.
Thanks for reading
*Hans Rojas Vallejos