Tuesday, November 11, 2008

SA: Data entry and contact info verification nearly done


The last week has been a busy one for the CREHS Cohort Study in South Africa. Firstly, we began the process of capturing the data contained in all the questionnaires completed by our 377 cohort members. As shown in the picture above, it took 11 boxes to transport the approximately 3400 questionnaires to the data capturing company. The pictures below show the data capturers hard at work. In what is known as double-entry, they are capturing all the information in all the questionnaires twice. The two databases are then compared and any contradictions or errors corrected, thus ensuring 100% accuracy. This process will hopefully be completed by Friday.

Secondly, and as many of you experienced first-hand, we have also kicked-off our first effort to confirm/update the contact details of our cohort members. All-in-all, we are targeting about 250 cohort members now. The rest will be contacted early in 2009. About 100 cohort members verified their contact details by SMS (Thanks for responding to the request!) and over the last 5 days we have personally spoken to another approximately 120. Again, the hope is to complete the last few remaining verifications in the next day or two.

Our next step will be to use the entered data to produce a basic profile of the South African cohort, which we will hopefully be able to post on this website in December. It will then be possible to compare the South African cohort with the Thai one, whose profile is already up on the website.

Until then, good luck with your exam results and with those night shifts that we know some of you are working at the moment!






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