The coronavirus pandemic posed a great challenge to Latin America and the Caribbean governments as they had to make hard policy decisions with incomplete information in a scenario changing daily. In order to produce the nationwide data needed to mitigate the crisis impacts, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) sought the technical assistance of Sistemas Integrales to design and execute: a Survey of Citizen Responses and Perceptions During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Conducted in August 2020, the survey gathered data about the impact of the epidemic on labor, income, finances and remittances. Given citizen mobility restrictions and social distance measures, it was implemented by phone. The sample featured households surveyed in 2016 and 2017 by the Suriname Survey of Living Conditions, which had collected phone numbers for almost all interviewed households. 

Sistemas Integrales was responsible for the sample design, field implementation, quality control and data management. A comprehensive quality control system, put in place over the entire field period to ensure the accuracy of the collected data, featured:

• Audio supervision of questions in 100% of interviews via RAS, an in-house developed application that records questions at random and manages the recordings so trained auditors may assess them both quantitatively and qualitatively.
• Monitoring of aggregate quality indicators, based on data and paradata, displayed and analyzed through an interactive online dashboard over the full field period.

With data collection executed in partnership with the field firm Datafruit, the quality control activities allowed the management team to identify nonsampling errors and interviewer effects speedily and to act accordingly. 

The anonymized final data will be fully available at the IDB website.