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Field teams, interviewer IDs, health investigators [message #22784]

Mon, 10 May 2021 05:28

Richard H.
Messages: 3
Registered: May 2021

Member

Dear all,

I'm a doctoral student currently working on a research project in which I would like to investigate to what degree variation in biomarker measurements is depending on interviewers. Therefore, I had planned to work with the interviewer IDs, but got confused on how to read them. Any help on the following three questions/observations would be greatly appreciated.

1. Were field teams assigned randomly to households within primary sampling units?

2. In the project report I have read that in total 789 field teams were deployed to conduct all interviews/measurements. Paragraph 1.7 states that each field team consisted of 1 supervisor, 3 female interviewers, 1 male interviewer and 2 health investigators. In total, this would mean that 789*4=3156 interviewers and 2*789=1578 health investigators were involved. However, the variable hv018 (=interviewer ID) only contains 523 unique values, so I would assume that this is actually the field team ID. But since 523 is not equal to 789 I'm very confused about the interviewer ID. What does it actually depict?

3. Who took blood pressure measurements? The health investigators or the interviewers? I saw that it is documented which health investigator took the blood sample for HIV testing, but couldn't find the same info for blood pressure. Is there even any way to tell who took the blood pressure measurements (this is what I'm mainly working with)?

Thanks a lot in advance for any help with this.

Best regards,
Richard

[Updated on: Thu, 13 May 2021 07:42]

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Re: Field teams, interviewer IDs, health investigators [message #22854 is a reply to message #22784]

Mon, 24 May 2021 10:46

Bridgette-DHS
Messages: 3199
Registered: February 2013

Senior Member

Following is a response from Senior DHS Specialist, Fred Arnold:

1. The field teams were not assigned completely randomly to the sample households. The supervisor on each team assigned interviewers and health investigators to sample households. Although in some cases they were assigned randomly, they also took into account such factors as the experience and ability of the field workers, the availability of the fieldworkers and the location of the households.

2. The interviewer numbers are not unique throughout the whole country. In NFHS-4 there were 14 field agencies that were assigned to one or more states and union territories. The interviewer numbers are unique within an assigned state or union territory, so to get a unique number throughout the country, you need to combine the state or union territory number with the interviewer number. The only problem you may have is in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Each of those states were split into regions for implementation of the fieldwork (three regions in Uttar Pradesh and two regions in Madhya Pradesh). Those regions were assigned to different field agencies, so the interviewer numbers may be unique within each region, but not for the state as a whole.

3. The blood pressure measurements and all of the other biomarker measurements in each household were assigned to one of the two health investigators on the team.

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Re: Field teams, interviewer IDs, health investigators [message #22857 is a reply to message #22854]

Tue, 25 May 2021 04:49

Richard H.
Messages: 3
Registered: May 2021

Member

Dear Bridgette and Arnold,

thank you very much for your response, this is very helpful.

I would have three short follow-up questions. Conerning point

2. I assume the same holds for the field supervisor ID? I would have to interact them with the state ID?

3.1 I could not find any information on the health investigators in the data. Would you be so kind to confirm that health investigator IDs were not documented?
3.2 Am I right to assume that a female health investigator took all measurements of female individuals and a male investigator took all measurements of male individuals? Could I then not create two IDs per field team, one that I assign to all females (=the female health investigator) and one that I assign to all males (=the male investigator)? The only problem I see here is that maybe health investigators were part of several field teams and I would treat them as separate individuals. What would be your take on this?

Thanks again.

Best,
Richard

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Re: Field teams, interviewer IDs, health investigators [message #22877 is a reply to message #22857]

Thu, 27 May 2021 13:59

fredarnold
Messages: 45
Registered: March 2014

Member

Hi Richard,

As it turns out, only the interviewer IDs are shown in the NFHS-4 recode files. The health investigator codes are not included, so you will not be able to identify the health investigator for your analysis.

Fred

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Re: Field teams, interviewer IDs, health investigators [message #22883 is a reply to message #22784]

Fri, 28 May 2021 03:11

Richard H.
Messages: 3
Registered: May 2021

Member

Dear Fred,

thanks for your quick response.

This is very unfortunate, as I will now probably have to use other data for working on my research question.

Richard

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