A comparative study on data collection methods; digital versus paper based for community health surveys

Abstract

Background: This study has compared two community data collection methods, digital data collection to paper-based by focusing on three aspects: the quality of the data collected using each method, the cost involved in using each method for short and long term and the time consumed when collecting Community Health Data using each method. Aim: The aim of this study was to compare the two data collection methods with the target of finding the best to be used for conducting community surveys. This study answered the following question: Between digital data collection method and paper based data collection method which one is the best in terms of the quality of collected data, cost effectiveness and time consumed for community health data collection? Methods: After getting the permission to conduct this study granted by IRB office and the authorization to conduct data collection granted by the Principal of the college of Medicine and Health sciences, a self administered questionnaire was distributed to the study participants and used to gather information for the current study. All data gathered on the returned surveys were entered in an Excel master file. The analyses were generated using Stata version 13 Data Analysis and Statistical Software. Results: In this study, it is found that researchers from UR-CMHS used much more paper based data collection method (74.32% from Table 4.2) than digital data collection method (22.97%). But, when respondents were asked to make a choice among the two data collection method for the next data collection activities, 74.67% of participants (From Table 4.3) have chosen to use Digital data collection method against 25.77% who have chosen to use paper based data collection method. Conclusion: The final results of this study show that Digital Data collection method is the best one when it is compared to paper based data collection, since it presents good data quality, it is cheaper when used in long term and it is faster than paper based, which accelerate the feedback to the community.