Assessing socio-economic profile of U-Reporters: Towards establishing a pool for equity analysis of future crowdsourced surveys

Abstract

Background Crowdsourcing was recognized as having the potential to collect informationrapidly, inexpensively and accurately. U-Report is a mobile empowermentplatform that connects young people all over the world to information thatwill change their lives and influence decisions. Previous studies of U-Report’s effectivenesshighlight strengths in the timeliness, low cost and high credibility forcollecting and sending information, however they also highlight areas to improveon concerning data representation. EquityTool has developed a simpler approachto assess the wealth quintiles of respondents based on fewer questions derived fromlarge household surveys such as Multiple Indicators Cluster Surveys (MICS) andDemographic and Health Surveys (DHS).Methods The methodology of Equity Tool was adopted to assess the socio-economicprofile of U-Reporters (ie, enrolled participants of U-Report) in Bangladesh.The RapidPro flow collected the survey responses and scored them against theDHS national wealth index using the EquityTool methodology. This helped placingeach U-Reporter who completed all questions into the appropriate wealth quintile.Results With 19% of the respondents completing all questions, the respondentsfell into all 5 wealth quintiles, with 79% in the top-two quintiles and only 21% inthe lower-three resulting in an Equity Index of 53/100 where 100 is completelyin line with Bangladesh equity distribution and 1 is the least in line. An equitablerandom sample of 1828 U-Reporters from among the regular and frequent respondentswas subsequently created for future surveys and the sample has an EquityIndex of 98/100.Conclusions U-Report in Bangladesh does reach the poorest quintiles while theinitial recruitment skews to respondents towards better off families. It is possible tocreate an equitable random sub-sample of respondents from all five wealth quintilesand thus process information and data for future surveys. Moving forward, U-Reportersfrom the poorly represented quintiles may be incentivized to recruit peersto increase equity and representation. In times of COVID-19, U-Report in combinationwith the EquityTool has the potential to enhance the quality of crowdsourceddata for statistical analysis