Agility: Adapting Survey Collection during COVID-19

As social science researchers, we often need to glean information from the communities we serve, and one of the best tools for this is survey collection and in-person interviews. COVID-19 put an abrupt stop to our in-person survey collection efforts and has required us to adapt quickly to meet project and client needs while keeping our staff and community members safe.

Through this process, our Survey Best Practice Team has gathered together the best practices and resources to move our work moving forward. We wanted to share some of the learnings we have implemented during COVID-19:

1. You don’t need to meet in person to do meaningful work- Our team facilitated a virtual listening session with nearly 30 community organizations to allow participants to brainstorm together on the best ways to administer new or ongoing online surveys, recruit participants, and distribute online survey links and incentives. Virtual tools make this engagement possible and productive and we can all continue building deeper partnerships with authentic remote engagement by setting up strong meeting facilitation, clear goals, and using the available tools to connect with each other virtually.

2. Take this time to learn more about how your communities are affected - To document the important ways our clients, their programs, and the recipients of their programs and services are being affected by COVID-19, many projects are adding COVID-related questions to new or existing surveys and interviews. While we need to move our existing work forward, we can’t ignore the extraordinary circumstances our communities face and must be adaptive to what is happening around us.  We must also remain cognizant of the ethical challenges in conducting any research during a humanitarian crisis.

3. Data collected in evaluation during the pandemic will need to be interpreted with a "COVID lens" –Because of this, we think about overall research design and give a real effort to document the effects of COVID-19 on communities. Reconsidering the overall research study design as it is affected by these events, you must think how “history" or "disaster effects" may impact survey responses and data collected and also adapt outreach to keep groups safe and account for these historic events in your analysis.

4. Share best practices with clients- In response to this pandemic, our project teams are all partnering to develop best practices, technical assistance tools, and recommendations for data collection and sharing them with clients. Cross collaboration and knowledge sharing is critical to being responsive and adaptive and quickly sharing best practices -- we must all continue to learn from each other.

5. Remain true to your values - It can be easy to become sidetracked by historic events and to over-focus on their effects while forgetting the overarching cause at hand.  Stay true to your core values and keep them at the front of the research efforts. And, as you continue to learn and adapt, always remember to remain mission-focused on serving your communities.   

Through our research, we’re able to tell the stories of our communities, and our work should not and will not stop amidst the challenges resulting from COVID-19. As we all continue to learn and grow through this experience, we hope to continue sharing our best practices to help our community partners continue moving their important work forward in support of our communities.