Kenya - State of the Cities Baseline Survey 2012-2013

Start	End	Cycle
2012-06-15	2013-02-15	N/A

Face-to-face [f2f]
The project goals include a comparison of households with expenditures above and below the poverty line. In the course of questionnaire development, NORC recommended using a relative poverty measure, whose formula is given at the end of the Introduction of this report. Poverty rate data from the KIHBS published report shows a 27 percent poverty rate for all urban areas. There is,however, a wide variation among poverty rates among the four urban centers for which they are separately reported, ranging from 19.6 percent in Nairobi to 41.4 percent in Nakuru. For these four towns, the place specific rates could be used to divide households into poor and non-poor groups. For the balance, the national rate for urban areas excluding these four municipalities, 33.1 percent could be employed.

The Kenya State of the Cities questionnaire underwent extensive testing prior to the main data collection. NORC and its data collection subcontractor, Infotrak Research and Consulting (IRC), carried out focus groups in Nairobi and Thika, incorporating suggested wording and flow changes. The questionnaire was translated by two independent translators and then pretested again amongst interviewers and supervisors for additional input to both the English and Kiswahili versions. Finally, the data collection team pre-tested the questionnaire, including protocols for gaining cooperation, among a convenience sample in two neighborhoods in Nairobi. Changes to the questionnaire were tracked, with explanations for changes, deletions and additions. All changes were reviewed by the WB research team and programmed into the survey application only after approval by the World Bank.

NORC contracted Manobi, S.A., a telecommunications and data company based in Senegal to program the questionnaire for use as a computer-assisted-personal-interview (CAPI). The program was loaded onto tablet computers and field-tested prior to data collection.

Duration: Pretesting of the paper questionnaire prior to programming suggested a mean duration of approximately 50 minutes. Pretesting of the programmed questionnaire during supervisor pretest in-office and in the field showed an approximate length of 45 minutes. Fielded duration showed a median of 21 minutes, with some variation among cities, as shown in Table 4 in Appendix C. While duration values are captured automatically within the questionnaire in the form of timestamps at each question, the total duration of interviews may have been compromised when some supervisors, in keeping with common practice for paper and pencil surveys, reviewed enumerators’ completed electronic questionnaires after completion and before transmitting the surveys to the server. This activity of scrolling through the questionnaire may have reset timestamps, causing completed surveys to appear very short in duration.

Challenges and Adjustments: The Kenya State of the Cities baseline survey comprised a complex and very large-scale set of data collection
activities. The listing task required in-person door-to-door enumeration of over 140,000 households in 15 cities
across Kenya. The interviewing task required locating, gaining cooperation and interviewing approximately 14,600
respondents. The NORC/IRC team experienced several challenges over the course of the project, specifically
• Missing or inaccessible enumeration areas;
• Extended field period overlapping election season; and,
• Enumerator errors.
These are described in more detail in section A.7 of the final Overview Report (provided under the Related Materials tab).

The questionnaire was developed by World Bank staff with input from stakeholders in the Kenya Municipal Program and NORC researchers and survey methodologists. The base questionnaire for the project was a 2004 World Bank survey of Nairobi slums. However, an extended iterative review process led to many changes in the questionnaire. The final version that was used for programming provided under the Related Materials tab, and in Volume II of the Overview.

The questionnaire’s topical coverage is indicated by the titles of its nine modules:
1. Demographics and household composition
2. Security of housing, land and tenure
3. Housing and settlement profile
4. Economic profile
5. Infrastructure services
6. Health
7. Household enterprises7
8. Civil participation and respondent tracking

Staffing the large scale data collection was a crucial factor in establishing high quality data. Supervisors and interviewers were recruited by IRC using guidelines developed by NORC, which emphasized CAPI experience, face-to-face interviewing experience, the ability to gain cooperation and a commitment to data quality. Interviewers were grouped into eight teams of 6-8 interviewers, each of which was led by an IRC supervisor with experience managing complex face-to-face social scientific surveys Training for the data collection team took place in three phases. In the first phase, supervisors were recruited,with particular care taken to include supervisors from ethnic and linguistic groups represented among the15 cities. Supervisors participated in a five-day pretesting activity that included 2.5 days of classroom and small group training to become familiar with the tablet computers and programmed questionnaire, followed by two days of pretesting among a convenience sample of respondents in informal settlements in Nairobi.

The second phase of training included a one-day Training of Trainers (ToT) and two days of Supervisor training, including detailed instruction on carrying out listing and sampling, gaining cooperation among respondents, coaching interviewers, reporting and ensuring quality control, confidentiality and security. Eight supervisors attended the ToT and Supervisor training.

The third phase of training included five days of classroom and small group activities for the 58 interviewers brought to training followed by two days of piloting among a convenience sample in informal areas of Nairobi. All interviewers were required to pass a practical exam using the tablet questionnaire and to successfully demonstrate all listing and interviewing tasks during the two day pilot. After training, three interviewers were dismissed from the data collection.