When planning your assessment, consider the team composition for data collection. Factors for consideration include:
- Budget: What budget is there for data collection personnel including logistical costs for implementing the assessment? Often the budget is the limiting factor. Consider all costs associated with conducting data collection including per diem and travel expenses, the amount of time for interviews, and the distance to sites for data collection.
- Types of Data Collection: What data collector skills are needed based on your chosen assessment methods? Some assessments may require specialized skills or additional training to accommodate specialized skills. For example, if you are conducting an interoperability assessment of surveillance systems, your data collection team may include an informatics expert to help guide the assessment. If you are conducting qualitative data collection and analysis, having data collectors who have conducted interviewing or other qualitative methods will be important. Many methods for data collection can be taught as part of training, but the more specialized training that is needed can lead to a longer and more expensive assessment.
- Data Analysis: Often only one statistician is needed to analyze quantitative data, but qualitative data often takes two or three people to code interviews and triangulate data. Both qualitative and quantitative data can provide rich information, particularly when used synergistically. Qualitative data analysis may be particularly time intensive.
- Supervision: What types of supervision will be needed of the data collection teams? This can impact the number of data collection members you can hire.
See Peru Case Study for example of data collection team for a national assessment.