Digital Tools for Data Collection

Concept

Online survey platforms let researchers build questionnaires, distribute links and collect responses automatically. Google Forms is free and sends results to Google Sheets; Microsoft Forms is similar within Microsoft 365; SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics offer advanced features and academic licences; LimeSurvey is open source; KoboToolbox, ODK and SurveyCTO support offline mobile collection in the field; REDCap serves clinical and academic research with strong data-security features. Useful functions include skip logic (branching), randomisation of items, validation rules, multilingual forms and export to CSV, Excel or SPSS. Limitations are self-selection bias, coverage bias, low response and duplicate or bot responses.

Concept

Computer-assisted methods replace the paper questionnaire. CAPI (computer-assisted personal interviewing) means an interviewer asks questions face to face and enters answers on a tablet or laptop; CATI is the telephone version; CAWI is web-based self-completion; CASI is computer-assisted self-interviewing; IVR is interactive voice response; PAPI is the traditional pen-and-paper personal interview. Built-in skip patterns, range checks, GPS and time stamps reduce entry errors and speed up processing. Large national surveys in India, such as the recent rounds of the National Family Health Survey, have used tablet-based CAPI.

Concept

Video platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams allow interviews and focus groups across distance, with recording only after informed consent. Transcription may be manual or automatic (Otter, Trint, Whisper-based tools and similar), but automatic transcripts must be checked against the audio for errors, names and dialect. Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific and CloudResearch recruit participants quickly for surveys and experiments; researchers must pay fairly and use attention checks to guard against careless or automated responses. Citizen-science sites such as Zooniverse crowdsource data classification by volunteers.

Concept

Researchers can gather data from the web by scraping (extracting content from pages with tools such as BeautifulSoup, Scrapy or Selenium) or, more cleanly, through an API (application programming interface) offered by a platform. Other sources are Google Trends (relative search interest), web analytics, social-media analytics, sensors and Internet-of-Things devices, satellite imagery and open government data such as data.gov.in. Big data is classically defined by three Vs: volume, velocity and variety, with veracity and value often added, and it is handled with tools such as Hadoop and Spark. Problems include representativeness, platform rules and API limits, and privacy and consent.