Baseline, endline and M&E fieldwork

Monitoring and evaluation fieldwork is ordinary survey work with a harder constraint. The endline has to be comparable to the baseline. Balcostics Research supplies the field team, the programming, the supervision and the documented file. We do that as prime field contractor or as the Jamaican partner under an international evaluator.

If the contract stops at data collection, the analysis stays with you.

What an evaluator can hand us

• A baseline instrument, an endline instrument, or both.
• The sample design, including any panel of the same communities or firms.
• Enumerator manuals and consent language, which we train to the word.
• A required CAPI package. We have fielded CSPro as prime contractor and we work in SurveyCTO when the programme names it. Where the programme is silent, we use the myVoice field collector.
• A timeline and a parish list.

You receive the dataset, a codebook and a field report. Edits are listed. Respondent-level files carry a written disposal date. The standard is the data protection page.

Child Protection Compact, baseline and endline

Clients ask whether we can come back for the endline under someone else's contract. This is that pair.

The baseline was in 2019. We were a subcontractor to GeoPoll. The work was CAPI with some CATI, about 940 interviews, in 6 parishes.

The endline ran from December 2021 to February 2022. We were a subcontractor to EnCompass, on a programme linked to USAID and the U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons office. The mode was CAPI in the field. The EnCompass report records 302 community interviews, 101 with the Jamaica Constabulary Force, 130 with other Government of Jamaica respondents, and 69 with leaders.

Read both waves together on the Child Protection Compact case study.

Upper Rio Minho baseline

In 2018 we were the prime field contractor for a baseline with ESSA Technologies and the Inter-American Development Bank in the Upper Rio Minho. The completed work was about 500 farmers, face-to-face, with a focus-group script. The write-up is the case study.

The World Bank Respect Survey in 2023 was CAPI in Jamaica. Our role on that job was field contractor. The Enterprise Survey the same year, Jamaica and Barbados, was a teaming subcontract signed on 14 February 2023. Both are on the World Bank case study.

How we work with evaluators

1. You send the instrument, the sample note, the mode and the parishes.
2. We review flow, skips and timing, and we say where a doorstep version needs a cut. You approve the cut.
3. We program the instrument and test it on our devices, then train interviewers and run a pilot.
4. Fieldwork runs under daily supervision. On the myVoice field collector that includes GPS at start and finish, a supervisor flag beyond 500 metres, per-question timing, contact attempts and Kish selection inside the household. The app is Android, offline first, then sync.
5. We clean to the codebook and deliver by the method in the contract.
6. If you return for an endline, we would rather reuse the same programmed skips than retype them from a PDF.

Focus-group logistics and key informant interviews can sit beside the quantitative wave. We moderate focus groups and arrange the logistics. If your evaluation needs a full qualitative volume, say so in the terms of reference and we will tell you what we can staff.

Training rooms in Kingston and Manchester are available on demand. Coverage is all 14 parishes, drawn from an island-wide interviewer and supervisor pool.

For the national household reference, UNICEF MICS 2022 remains the prime-contractor job: 7,118 households completed of 7,401 occupied, sample of 7,903 dwellings, CAPI in CSPro. It was a multiple-indicator survey, not an impact evaluation, and we describe it that way on the MICS case study.

To scope a baseline or an endline, send sample size, mode, parishes, timeline and budget range through the quote page.