Labor Force Survey 2001

All completed questionnaires were brought to NIS for processing. Although completed questionnaires were checked and edited by supervisors in the field, because of the length of questionnaires and the complexity of the topics covered the need for manual editing and coding by trained staff was accepted as an essential priority activity to produce a cleaned data file without delay. In all 4 staff comprising 3 processing staff and 1 supervisor were trained for two days by the project staff. An instruction manual for manual editing and coding was prepared and translated into Khmer for the guidance of processing staff.

In order to produce an unedited data file, keying in the data as recorded by field enumerators and supervisors, (without subjecting data to manual edit as required by the Analysis Component Project staff), it was necessary to structure manual editing as a two-phase operation. Thus in the first phase, the processing staff coded the questions such as those industry, and occupation which required coding. Editing was restricted to selected structural edits and some error corrections. These edits were restricted to checking the completeness and consistency of responses, legibility, and totaling of selected questions. Error corrections were made without canceling or obliterating the original entry made by the enumerator, by inserting the correction close to the original entry.

Much of the manual editing was carried out in the second phase, after key entry and one hundred percent verification and extraction of error print outs. A wide range of errors had to be corrected which was expected in view of the complexity of the survey and the skill background of the enumeration and processing staff. The manual edits involved the correction of errors arising from incorrect key entry, in-correct/ failure to include identification, miss-coding of answers, failure to follow skip patterns, misinterpretation of measures, range errors, and other consistency errors.