Community_scoping/Handout_on_Sample_Household_Census_Form/handout
Household Census Forms
Household census forms can be general but they are of most use if they are adapted for your own purposes.
This example was prepared for use in India in the RECOUP project, which accounts for several of its specific features:
- There are more questions on schooling than you might need in a project with a different focus.
- The information on young men and women who have moved out of the household was necessary because one RECOUP sub-project wanted to interview parents and their children.
- Information on migrants was also important because RECOUP is concerned with the benefits of education: if young people used their skills to leave the community, we want to know about this .
- We wanted to know what it means to be poor in four different countries, so we tried to have similar questions about what people own. (It is not a good idea to ask about incomes, and asking about expenditures can take a lot of time. People are not always willing to list what they own either, but this is often less problematic.)
- We also wanted to collect better information about people with disability.
If at all possible, keep the census form to two pages overall, as it will be quick and easy to fill in the field. You will need a spare sheet anyway for households with more than 8 members. Try not to add more questions unless you are sure you want to know the answers: the extra information that has been collected may not be used. This is a rough and ready basic research tool with specific purposes - to provide a context and provide information for sampling, in particular - and it should not take a lot of time.
The data should be entered into a relational database such as Access to eventually provide a complete household listing and summary statistics etc. You do not need to use SPSS or another statistical package: the idea is not to carry out statistical tests but to be able to summarise key features of the community.
You should decide whether researchers should code in the field (see the final page for an example) or have the coding done after returning to the office.
Singal, N., and Jeffery, R. (2008). Qualitative Research Skills Workshop: A Facilitator's Reference Manual, http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/RECOUP, Cambridge: RECOUP (Research Consortium on Educational Outcomes and Poverty, http://recoup.educ.cam.ac.uk/). CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. (original page)
