Step-by-step guide to conducting digital surveys for aquaculture performance assessment

In collaboration with its research and implementing partners, the University of Hohenheim, the Norwegian Veterinary Institute (NVI) and the Center for Environment Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS), WorldFish has designed online mobile phone data collection tools for farmer surveys that generate data needed for (1) an integrated assessment of tilapia epidemiology and health economics and (2) an integrated assessment of aquaculture systems performance. This document provides guidance for field implementation of both types of surveys. It is organized in four main parts. The first two parts apply broadly to efforts targeting successful preparation and implementation of the surveys. The first part describes the procedure for recruiting the field team, providing training and pretesting the surveys. The second part provides guidelines for using mobile data collection tools—in this case, Open Data Kit (ODK).1 The third and fourth parts present the two aforementioned field-tested farmer surveys, as examples. The first three parts have accompanying online training modules developed on the learn.ink2 platform.