admin
Ivan Zhakata Herald Correspondent
FOR the first time in the history of Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (Zimstat) is making use of a Data Quality Management Team to monitor all the data which is being collected by enumerators during the census.
The Data Quality Management Team was made to ensure that the agency produces quality results within the expected period of three months after the census ends on Saturday.
The 2022 population and housing census began last week on Thursday and will end on April 30.
Zimstat director for production statistics Mrs Mationesa Phiri who is also the coordinator for the Data Quality Management Team said the team seeks to ensure quality data by addressing partially completed cases.
Mrs Phiri said for Zimstat to enhance the quality of data that is being collected they came up with the Data Quality Management Team to monitor the data that is being put together.
“As it (data) is being collected we also have real-time monitoring of that data as well, while we will also be checking on errors and inconsistencies,” she said.
“We know that as data is being collected, we have our enumerators and supervisors but, however, we are also doing this process so that if anything was missed by enumerators during the data collection is also missed by the supervisor then we can run through the data that is being collected and give feedback to the field staff for them to check on any inconsistencies that we would have picked as a team.
“This process is real-time and on a daily basis, we are downloading our server, running through the batch files, giving feedback by province, district until it gets back to the respective enumerators where that data needs attention. When the data gets there we make sure that we get feedback from the provinces.”
This year, enumerators are using the Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) technique during the data collection exercise.
CAPI is a face-to-face data collection method in which the interviewer uses a tablet, mobile phone or a computer to record answers given during the interview.
The system facilitates logic checks, skip patterns, and validations during the interview making the census more efficient in assuring higher quality data.
Mrs Phiri said the Data Quality Management Team was making sure that they produce quality data that is important for informed decisions.
“When we give them the list of errors that we picked from the data set we also have them give us the feedback and when they give us the feedback that the errors have been addressed we also run again the data set to ensure that those errors have been addressed.”
Online Reporter