Santanu Pramanik, Senior Fellow at NCAER and Deputy Director of NDIC, presented on “Statistical validation of a large-scale web survey during the COVID-19 pandemic in India” at the University of Michigan, Survey Research Centre Faculty Seminar. This was a joint work with Abhinav Motheram, Research Analyst, NCAER-NDIC and Soumi Roy Chowdhury, ex colleague at NCAER.
Using data from the COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey (CTIS) from India, the largest public health web survey, the authors examine the bias in the estimates of vaccine uptake, a population measure which changes rapidly with time. Their findings show that the bias in CTIS estimates of vaccine uptake is not constant over time, rather it increases up to a certain point of time and then decreases. Since the absence of independently verified ‘ground truth’ or ‘gold standard’ for assessing bias in surveys is well acknowledged, they discuss the need for statistical representativeness of web surveys with respect to key demographic characteristics of respondents, which are often correlated with many outcome variables.
Dr Sonalde Desai, Professor at NCAER, who holds a joint appointment at University of Maryland, USA, has recently been appointed as Distinguished University Professor (DUP) at the University. DUP status is a permanent honorific title that recognises exceptional records in research, teaching, and service.
Dr Desai has also been appointed to the Committee on Population of the National Academy of Sciences based in Washington, D.C. In addition, she has been elected as President of the Population Association of America (PAA) for 2022
The NCAER National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC) has launched a gender data hub, supported by a five-year grant from Co-Impact. This hub will focus on research supporting evidence-based policy design from a gender perspective. It will serve as a resource for researchers, policy-makers, civil society representatives, and journalists by undertaking gender-focused analyses of data in areas of livelihoods, health, education, and family formation. The activities undertaken by this hub will include enhancing access to data collected by NCAER, visiting fellowships for practitioners and researchers, and seminars addressing strategies for incorporating a gender lens in data collection processes. Sonalde Desai, Professor, NCAER and Centre Director, NDIC, and Pallavi Choudhuri, Senior Fellow, NCAER, will lead this initiative.
Data collection for the third round of the much-awaited India Human Development Survey (IHDS-3), has started from the second week of May 2022 and is in full swing. The India Human Development Survey (IHDS) is a nationally representative, multi-topic panel survey. The NDIC team conducted an extensive training programme for interviewers and field staff. The three-week long training covered IHDS overview, discussion of household and community questionnaires, demonstration of data model in Blaise, survey and sample management in SurveyTrak, mock practice and field practice of interviews. Data collection has been completed from households, communities (villages/urban blocks), health facilities and schools in the States of Haryana, Punjab, Chandigarh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Tripura, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Jammu and Kashmir. The primary survey is ongoing in Odisha, Kerala, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Assam and the six other North-eastern States.
