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Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
Although enumerators are crucial for the success of development projects, their lived experiences remain understudied. Sharing ethnographic findings from an interdisciplinary project, we examine how the working conditions of research officers in large-scale quantitative surveys impact data quality.
Paper long abstract:
Enumerators are crucial for the success of development projects. They collect the data which is subsequently analysed by project managers and ends up informing policy decisions. Yet, how the lived experiences and working conditions of enumerators impact data quality in large-scale development surveys is understudied. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork in Kenya with experienced as well as early-career enumerators, we present preliminary results of an interdisciplinary project funded by the British Academy.
We specifically focus on ethnographic observations made by ourselves and a group of citizen ethnographers. We focus on enumerators’ motivations to deliver good work and how research officers themselves understand the relation between their working conditions and high-quality data. We will discuss how an existing but unrecognized professional ethics among enumerators creates incentives to work well when valued as an integral part of knowledge production while the same professional ethics reduces data quality when left unrecognized by other stakeholders.
Our paper thereby offers important insights into the complex, and sometimes contradictory, relations between survey work in East Africa as a transactional relation between enumerators and principal investigators and/or research organizations, on the one hand, and survey work as a source of professional pride, on the other.
Making an impact: ethnographic approaches to producing “good data”
Session 1