Audio Recording of Household Interviews to Ensure Data Quality

The use of audio recording technology in the collection of quantitative household survey data in developing countries offers many benefits at a low cost. The benefits include ensuring that interviews take place, training and supervision of enumerators, assuring data quality, secure data storage, and easy data sharing, among others. This paper describes the use of audio recording by a research project that collected household level data in rural western Kenya in 2011–2012. I discuss the benefits of audio recording, both anticipated and encountered, as well as the costs and the applicability of this method in other research settings.