Using Personal Digit Assistants for the 2004 Cotton Objective Yield Survey

摘要

In the fall of 2003, the North Carolina Field Office (NC FO) and the Research and Development Division studied the use of personal digital assistants (PDAs) for the 2004 Cotton Objective Yield Survey (COY). The NC field enumerators were provided with PDAs to record COY data on them instead of on paper forms. The goals of the study were to develop a user-friendly data collection instrument to operate on a PDA which field enumerators could successfully record COY data into and securely transmit the data to the NC FO. This project also investigated if using PDAs would improve the data collection process, provide the collected data to the office staff quicker, improve data quality, and be cost effective. The NC FO developed a process for field enumerators to collect COY data using PDAs. Each NC FO field enumerator team (composed of two people) was supplied with a PDA.