Multi-faceted team with its ability to innovate, its capability to collect data across India and its ever evolving data quality improvement systems are at the core of the strengths of the DRS.
DRS has a strong team of research professionals drawn from various subject disciplines complemented by external consultants and subject matter specialists. The competent, experienced and committed professionals make the core team of DRS.
DRS has a strong in-house team of analysts comprising software professionals and data analysts. Varied profile, rich knowledge and vast experience of the team make it formidable combination for handling advanced data analysis.
Our innovative approach towards various research programs, which cultivates a wide array of designs, concepts and tools, has now become our signature style. Consequently, while our solutions might appear simple to the naked eye, they serve as an infallible catalyst in gaining fresh perspectives to analyze findings relevant to the brief.
The Government Of Andhra Pradesh was seeking an effective solution to capture and respond to issues of civil society. DRS developed and implemented ’Praja Spandana’ (People’s Pulse)-a path breaking research approach to facilitate better governance. Team DRS created a seamless feedback and response mechanism between citizens and the Government. The research system enabled collecting continuous citizen feedback on governance and development related issues from both urban and rural areas across the state. The Government utilized the information to prioritize civil society problems and implement timely solutions.
The Government of Gujarat aimed to increase participation from within to develop and implement good governance. A number of schemes were on the anvil and the government was seeking immediate inclusion of its workforce as primary stakeholders in the design of governance process. The project presented a unique set of challenges. It was first–of-its-kind, it had huge scale and there was paucity of time.
Team DRS designed and implemented ‘Karmayogi Sarvabhipray’. Views from 3.5 lakh government employees across Gujarat were successfully captured within a short span of time. The findings from the study helped design employee-friendly policies and led to an enabling environment for good governance.
BBC World Service Trust was seeking to assess the impact of its national level Enter-Educate TV serial- Jasoos Vijay. The assessment aimed to present an integrated analysis of findings from mid-line and end-line studies in conjunction with baseline reports. However, the task imposed the challenge of comparable baseline data. DRS developed a Matched Sampling Design to conduct a micro-analysis of respondent profiles in the mid-line and end-line study and emerge with analysis that was statistically valid and programmatically useful.
The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) was seeking to ascertain State wise drop-out rates of children in elementary schools.
Traditional approaches calculate drop-out rates using school records. DRS changed the research perspective. School records were used, but with a simple innovation. DRS created a methodology to track school drop-outs to their households to record their current status.
The findings demonstrated that a significant number of children who were assumed to have discontinued their education had in fact re-enrolled themselves in other schools and are continuing their education.
DRS is capable of undertaking research across the country. Its Head Office in New Delhi, Regional Offices across regions, and state field offices in all important states facilitate its pan India operations. DRS’s capability to manage large studies can be gauged from the fact that we deployed over 1000 interviewers to cover over 8 Lakh households in some studies for over two years.
DRS believes that data quality is at the core of a survey research. The quality of data is a function of quality of interviewers, training of interviewers and quality monitoring during data collection and certain quality checks post data collection. DRS ensures adherence to the best standards in each of these areas. With experience, we have evolved our own process for recruitment and training of the interviewers, field data quality monitoring, data cleaning and data quality monitoring systems for survey research projects. This system is fine-tuned to suit the project specific requirements.
In long duration studies, a summary progress status is reported to the core team members while the data collection is still in progress in field. Using this status report, the core team monitors physical progress and quality aspects of the study on key parameters to understand the data trend and the reasons behind the trend. In addition the key researcher conducts regular review sessions with the field team and shares his inputs for improving or sustaining the quality.
Each questionnaire is edited at the office level to ensure consistency across questions, completeness, and legibility of responses. In long duration studies, every team does this exercise in the field as well.
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