PSA shifts to tablets in biggest family income, expenses survey

KALIBO, AKLAN – The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) shifted to using tablets instead of paper-based questionnaires in the conduct of expanded Family Income and Expenditure Survey in Aklan in July 2021.

The FIES is nationwide survey of households, which aims to gather data on the income distribution, levels of living and spending patterns of Filipino families.

According to Provincial Statistics Officer Antonet Catubuan, the use of tablets in data collection aims to improve the efficiency and accuracy of data collection to ease up the release of timely statistics.

“In pen-and-paper survey, processing of data is quite taxing because all accomplished questionnaires should undergo manual editing before they are being encoded to the processing system,” Catubuan said.

With the use of this technology, the process has been simplified because it will immediately proceed to data validation to check the inconsistency of data which saves a lot of time, effort and resources.

Tablets used by PSA field workers were installed with a program called Household App and a GPS to plot the exact location of the sample households.

Workloads and uploaded data are being controlled and managed by the Management Information System specifically designed for this activity.

This year’s round of FIES in Aklan covered 1,540 sample households spread in 85 barangays.

Fifty-four data collectors were commissioned by PSA-Aklan to conduct the house-to-house visit and interview the samples family.

Among the data being gather from the sample comprised expenditures on food, clothing, electricity, household equipment, health, transport, information and communication, education, restaurants, insurance and financial services, personal care, social protection and miscellaneous goods and services.

Also covered are housing characteristics, sources of income both in cash and in kind and percentage of expenditure items purchased online or through telephone.

These data will be used to determine the levels of living and disparities in income and spending patterns of families, and provide inputs in the estimation of poverty incidence.

PSA-Aklan assures respondents in this survey that the information to be provided to data collectors will be treated with utmost confidentiality as provided for by law.