Pendragon Forms
Background on Electronic Data Collection
Pendragon Forms is a software program that allows users to program any type of survey or questionnaire onto a digital handheld device – specifically a PDA or an iPhone or Android smart-phone. The Pendragon software sits in Microsoft Access, has a user friendly interface, and easily exports in CSV format for analysis in STATA, SPSS or MS Excel.
Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and survey companies around the world are increasingly shifting away from paper and pen surveys in favor of electronic data collection. The benefits of doing so are many: a well programmed survey can dictate skip patterns and logic checks, eliminating the uncanny ability of enumerators to ignore these basic instructions and/or skip questions; eliminate completely the need for expensive and sometimes error prone data entry; immediate, even nightly, access to and analysis of the data being collected; and automated “back-check” (sometimes called “audit”) surveys which can illustrate in detail the mistakes being made by enumerators. Each of these advantages improves the quality of data collected and reduces the turnaround time from collection to analysis.
Phones vs. Computers
PDAs/Smart-phones represent just one technology for this pupose. Multiple software suites are now available for laptops or tablets/netbooks (Surveybe and Blaise are two), and some smaller exercises are even using a SMS based system to transmit data from the field to a server in real time. That said, I and some other IPAers in Uganda are biased in favor of PDAs/Smartphones. The phone sized devices are considerably easier to travel with, have longer battery life and (much) shorter recharge times, are easily explained to rural respondents as being “just like a phone”, are less likely to break in the field, and are less likely to be the target of theft. Most importantly, having observed surveys conducted both with netbooks and with PDAs I believe there is a social barrier that comes between enumerator and respondent when a computer screen is placed in the middle, considerably more so than in the case with a phone in hand.
Personal Experience
As the Project Associate on IPA’s Rainwater Storage Device evaluation I planned and managed an extensive baseline survey of 3,240 households in rural western Uganda. Ours was the second IPA Uganda project to use Pendragon Forms and the first to use some of the more intricate programming techniques. I have since co-authored the IPA Pendragon Programming Manual, in which we share 50+ pages of lessons and tricks learned during our time programming and administering these surveys. We walk users through a step by step instruction to create an introductory form, explain in detail the scripting code unique to Pendgragon, illustrate how to use previously collected data as reference material in a current survey, and discuss designs for an automated back-check form using survey data for real-time accuracy checks. We end with a chapter on Wintask, a separate software that automates the process of entering survey questions in Pendragon from Excel, drastically reducing the time it takes to program a complete survey.
Contact Me
If you are considering using Pendragon Forms please feel free to contact me. Anyone in the IPA / JPAL family can access the PDA Manual on the internal Sharepoint site. For all others I am willing to provide consultation and discuss potential arrangements to assist in survey programming.
Email: BrianDSwartz [at] gmail [dot] com
I am not in any way associated with Pendragon Software Corporation and the opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
