I am planning to conduct a research on use of smart phone for health awareness among the villagers. I am confuse to use data collection tool to collect data. Can you suggest me the best tool for data collection from the villagers. I am planning to use focus group or schedule. Please suggest best one.
I think focus group will be perfect. Online or mobile survey is equally good. But the importance of using focus group is that it will help you study the reaction of smart phone users that uses it for health awareness, you can interact with your participants and pose questions, results can be easier to understand than other complicated statistical data, you can get information from non-verbal responses, such as facial expressions or body language. Information is provided more quickly than if participants were interviewed separately. Good luck
I will be conducting a similar project where I'll be collecting data from villagers.
Incorporated into my data collection methods are Focus Groups where I intend to use a video camera to record voices, capture facial expressions and body language.
Good luck with your research.
Esri has several program suites (Survey123, for example, and collector) that should permit you to develop a survey, ask questions and geolocate rersponses. Failing that, you can construct something on your own using a spreadsheet and lat-longs collected on site. I'll also note there are a number of programs out ther to help with survey design and collection. Esri's are good and the company is often very generous in helping those from developing nations with this kind of thing. You might write to them and ask for help and support.
A footnote to my last... I wrote about some of this in a non-technical paper for geographres called "Fighting Disease like Fighting Fires: the lessons Ebola Teaches." Canadian Geographer 2016, 60(3): 288–299. In other articles I focused more clearly on issues of data collection but the idea is here.
Depending on the audience and sensitivity of your information, Focus groups would be a preferable method to collect data. Focus Group discussions will allow you to probe further and gain a better understanding into your chosen discussion as compared to your other alternatives. Not only do you get verbal responses but, body language and facial expressions go a long way into decoding peoples views on your topic.
I agree with most of the respondents above that focus groups is an adequate method.
Focus groups and where possible, one-on-one interviews would be appropriate. But, focus groups can be negatively affected by group think. On the other hand, one-on-one is difficult due to challenges to track down a representative number of respondents.
One to one interview is best way to collect data from villagers. Focus group is also a good technique but as per my opinion one to one interview is best.
You are right in what you are saying so it is important as a researcher to get varied views from the group and not let the most dominant person speak for the others. Time could be an issue with interviews hence the need to vary your data collection methods. The sensitivity of the issues being discussed needs to be kept in mind too.
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