essay- use of smartphone outbreak of covid-19. answer the question fast don't write unnecessary answer if you don't know
Answers
Short message service (SMS), online surveys (web), computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), and interactive voice response (IVR) are some of the common ways to reach respondents to collect research data using mobile phones. These varied ways of using mobile phones can produce data faster and less expensively than face-to-face interview surveys. They also offer advantages like high anonymity and accessibility, especially in times of conflicts, disasters and disease outbreaks like Ebola and COVID-19. They can be designed and deployed in different languages just like traditional face-to-face surveys.
The SMS feature of mobile phones can be used to text questions and answers back and forth. An advantage of this method is that anyone with a cellphone can respond and is thus highly accessible. But this method also has significant limitations. First, it requires respondents to be literate and SMS-savvy. Second, questions and response options together cannot exceed 160 characters, and they are sent one at a time. Research suggests that in SMS surveys, respondents tend to lose interest more quickly than with other modes and thus there is a high rate of survey non-completion. This is in addition to the very high non-response rate for SMS surveys (90-95%).
The SMS feature of mobile phones can be also used to text respondents a link to a web survey they can complete from the browser on their phone. This option gives researchers greater flexibility with question wording. But in most developing countries the penetration of smartphones, although growing, is still only about 20-60%. Therefore, this option takes away the high accessibility advantage of mobile phone surveys. Moreover, SMS-web surveys suffer from the high non-response rate similar to SMS surveys.
Telephone surveys have long been used in developed countries like the U.S. CATI is an extension of this well-established method with enumerators using scripted questionnaires programmed in a computer (or a tablet) and entering the data while the interview is taking place. over the phone. A big advantage of CATI is that it can be done with any type of phone and does not require literacy on the part of respondents. CATI also has higher response rates than SMS and web surveys (about 30-40%) but is more expensive than those methods.
The IVR survey is a pre-recorded automated phone survey in which the respondent responds vocally to questions or enters numerical responses using the keypad. Although IVR surveys are cost effective, they typically have a longer turnaround time from survey deployment to project completion.
With the door for doing face-to-face surveys temporarily closed, more and more researchers are turning towards collecting data through mobile phones. But it is important to recognize that mobile phone surveys are not a perfect substitute for the traditional face-to-face surveys. As indicated in Table 1, mobile phone surveys have several limitations and are suitable only for some types of surveys and in certain conditions. These need to be considered carefully in making the decision to opt for this method.