Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2008-2009

The Bureau conducted training programmes for enumerators and supervisors at its four centres, followed by examinations to select those qualified. The training covered conduct of interviews, as well as the content of the questionnaires.

Data collection was continuous over a 1-year period. For each survey, a sixth of the sample households was covered in a 2-month sub-round. In effect, there were six independent sub-samples for each survey. Each sub-round sample was distributed into lots to ensure data was collected continuously for the whole 1-year period.

Field Work
Fieldwork arrangements were delegated to 4 field superintendents who put together their work plans, assigned the supervisors and enumerators, and ensured the regular accountable financing of their required activities, including travel, subsistence and fees.

The arrangements for the interview depended on the availability of the householder. For the diary the enumerators were required to visit the household daily for two weeks, to try to minimise omissions due to weaknesses in the recall.

The Enumerators were instructed to complete work in a selected EA within a time frame of 3 weeks. The first week was spent on listing all households in the EA and the following two weeks for gathering information on Schedule 2 (recurrent expenditure) Schedule 3 (2 week expenditure diary) and Schedule 4 (income).

While supervisors are normally required to check on enumerators on a daily basis by selecting households at random to confirm that the data recorded was actually reported by the householder, this was not generally possible for the 2008-09 survey, because of budgetary constraints. It should be emphasised for future surveys that such checks improve the data collection practice of the enumerators, and of the quality of the survey results in general.

With expenditure usually being better reported than incomes, where the former exceeded the latter, enumerators were required to re-question the relevant households for possible omissions of incomes. Enumerators were also trained to probe further where they observed that households had income-earning assets but were not reporting any related incomes. Enumerators and Supervisors were also required to check the validity of any large incomes and expenditures reported.