Quality assurance
We prepared a working manual for use by interviewer teams. In the field, completed questionnaires were reviewed by the team leader for completeness, accuracy and legibility at the end of each day. The team leader looked specifically for use of Arabic symbols for numbers (having different meanings in Nepali), mismatched age and gender of participants and differences between the list given by the head of household and the information from the participants. When minor mistakes were seen, the team leader corrected them after discussion with the interviewer; major mistakes or missing data missing were rectified by revisiting the household.
Every day while in the field, each team leader was required to contact the Nepali researchers (AR and KM) and report difficulties or queries. In addition, AR and KM made surprise visits to one of the two assigned sites of each team during data collection to ascertain that this was being done in accordance with expectations. We reviewed a random 10% sample of completed questionnaires and also cross-checked the collected data by revisiting 10% of households during the visit.