5 Designing your survey

Before any Mobile Data Collection deployment, you should spend the necessary time in preparation – this will usually save time later on when reviewing the quality of the data or trying to find answers to questions you forgot to ask! Here are some CartONG tips to get you off to a good start:

• Always check if a form has previously been created on a similar topic (even for another organization). Taking parts or all of a previous form can save a lot of time as well as ensuring greater standardization in the data collection.
• Check if your organization has forms or templates in terms of the topic or even the style if the data collection is unrelated.
• When faced with a technical problem, you can ask for help or search for similar issues and resolution on the ODK Forum, where the ODK community is very active.
• Beware of any wish or need to collect personal or sensitive data as this will have consequences on how you collect, store and manipulate those data. Until proven absolutely essential for the purpose of the data analysis, this should be avoided. More on this in section 5.3 Responsible Data Management in form design.

This section is thus composed of 7 sub-sections:

• 5.1 Thinking through your analysis
• 5.2 General form design principles
• 5.3 Responsible data management in form design
• 5.4 Using the right languages
• 5.5 General guidance for form coding
• 5.6 Building your form
• 5.7 Advanced features
  

Through the whole toolbox you will find reminders on the technical and methodological aspects to use when coding forms to keep data cleaning to a minimum.

This part of the toolkit often refers to the Data Analysis toolkit, which provides an understanding of the basic principles and tricks of data analysis.