Ghana - Agriculture - Land Tenure

Real time validity checks
Each of the three teams had one field editor who received each questionnaire on the field after administration by the enumerators. With the help of the supervisor, each questionnaire was checked for the presence of all sections as pertained to the household in question. In addition, consistency checks and checks for administration of all the questions required were done by the field editor and the supervisor. The questionnaires which had been edited by the field editor and the supervisor were then returned to the enumerator in question for corrections to be effected by revisiting the household where necessary or making changes that were clearly marked as enumerator mistake or oversight.

Edited questions transported to ISSER every other day were re-checked and edited by 20 office editors whose work was to identify inconsistencies, missing data and code responses which were given as "other". Questionnaires with problems that could not be resolved in the office were sent back to the field for changes to be effected; sometimes enumerators were called on phone for clarifications. In all about 600 questionnaires were returned to enumerators on the field to effect corrections.

In addition to all these, the head of the data entry team did random checks to find out if all the sections that were supposed to be answered by a particular household were present. He also brought queries on the validity of some household identification items and the structure of GPS coordinates as indicated on the questionnaire.

There were random spot checks in the various communities to ensure that the enumerators had actually visited the right households and identified the correct household structure.

Editing and Coding
A second stage editing plus coding of the open-ended questions was undertaken simultaneously as the data collection was being done. This started on 20th April 2010 and lasted for the entire period of the field work and the mop-up stage.

Data entry began concurrently with field work and data editing as soon as the first questionnaire was completely edited and coded. Entry was undertaken by 24 entry clerks. The data entered was periodically (at the end of each day) backed-up by the data entry manager. Each questionnaire was entered twice by different clerks after which, the data entry manager runs consistency checks for corrections to be effected.