Conducting Surveys and Social Studies

The SOC team of experts conducts qualitative and quantitative studies and surveys across various sectors and rural/urban areas, including refugee camps, to collect data related to households' profile, expenditure and income, food security, livelihood coping strategies, and the field impact of projects and policies. The assessment takes into account gender dimensions, community perspectives, and help provided by existing community mechanisms.

SOC has a tailored approach for stakeholder mapping that considers project requirements, accessibility and security for field researchers, and other factors.SOC will also develop criteria for the selection of targeted beneficiaries which may include age, gender, rural/urban, household structure, geographical, and other criteria recommended by the client's program team.

The main objective of this assessment is to collect data and information at the community level through conducting one-to-one interviews and focus-group discussions. This process will provide feedback from communities on existing/former services and program interventions in terms of quality and level of satisfaction. It will also help to determine the current situation on the knowledge, attitudes and practices/behaviors on issues related to program priority areas and security-development nexus considerations. Through this assessment, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of the issues affecting communities, allowing us to design better targeted programs to support them.

SOC follows a comprehensive surveying process which includes a preparatory phase to develop survey questionnaires and pre-test the questionnaire, finalizing the questionnaire, training the survey team and deploying them to target locations. To ensure quality control, SOC implements a strong quality control system utilizing their previous extensive experience in surveys and data collections services. SOC undertakes a pre-pilot survey to set the baseline, then conducts field interviews, records data by interviewers, and reviews and crosschecks answers by team leaders. Additionally, daily reporting by interviewers to the team leader to update progress and address any arising challenges is undertaken, with team leaders reporting to the client as needed. Finally, if required, SOC performs data analysis and cleaning, data triangulation by question, location, gender, employed/ unemployed and urban-rural, and finally, submitting the report, along with developing a presentation with key findings.