1. Open-source electronic data capture system offered increased accuracy and cost-effectiveness compared with paper methods in Africa.
- Author
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Dillon, David, Pirie, Fraser, Rice, Stephen, Pomilla, Cristina, Sandhu, Manjinder, Motala, Ayesha, and Young, Elizabeth
- Subjects
Data capture ,Electronic questionnaire ,Epidemiology ,Open-source ,Sub-Saharan Africa ,Survey ,Africa ,Cost-Benefit Analysis ,Data Collection ,Electronics ,Humans ,Paper ,Reproducibility of Results ,Surveys and Questionnaires - Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Existing electronic data capture options are often financially unfeasible in resource-poor settings or difficult to support technically in the field. To help facilitate large-scale multicenter studies in sub-Saharan Africa, the African Partnership for Chronic Disease Research (APCDR) has developed an open-source electronic questionnaire (EQ). STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: To assess its relative validity, we compared the EQ against traditional pen-and-paper methods using 200 randomized interviews conducted in an ongoing type 2 diabetes case-control study in South Africa. RESULTS: During its 3-month validation, the EQ had a lower frequency of errors (EQ, 0.17 errors per 100 questions; paper, 0.73 errors per 100 questions; P-value ≤0.001), and a lower monetary cost per correctly entered question, compared with the pen-and-paper method. We found no marked difference in the average duration of the interview between methods (EQ, 5.4 minutes; paper, 5.6 minutes). CONCLUSION: This validation study suggests that the EQ may offer increased accuracy, similar interview duration, and increased cost-effectiveness compared with paper-based data collection methods. The APCDR EQ software is freely available (https://github.com/apcdr/questionnaire).
- Published
- 2014