Open-sourcing survey instrument for “COVID-19 and Your Finances” in English and Spanish

Authored by: Ashirul Amin PhD

April 1, 2020 - 2 mins read

In order to conduct a rapid assessment of the impact of COVID-19, BFA Global deployed a “dipstick” online survey on Mar 25 and Mar 26 across seven countries. The blog post and dashboard that shared insights from the survey generated much interest, along with requests to share the instrument. We have therefore decided to open source the survey instrument in both English and Spanish.

The instrument is currently available in PDF and Google docs formats:

The survey consists of 53 questions, broken down into eight sections:

Dealing with the crisis
Impact of care-giving
Income and expenses
Financial resilience
Financial instruments and debt
Financial control
Business/Self-employment related questions
Demographic information

Virtually all these questions have been tested across multiple geographies over time and generally yield good data. Nevertheless, do deliberately localize for references to specific financial instruments, informal groups, social practices, etc.

You are free to mix and match as you wish, but we do ask that you consider sharing the summary results with us, especially if you deploy questions verbatim, or close to. This will allow us to triangulate across many more population segments than what we would be able to do alone. For much shorter surveys over SMS, a chatbot, or other cases where a lean research approach is necessary, we would recommend picking up to ten from this list. We have our favorites for a few different situations – do feel free to reach out if you’d like to discuss.

The development of this survey was made possible through the generous support of the Metlife Foundation. Amolo Ng’weno, Ashirul Amin, Ben Mazzotta, Gabriela Zapata, Jane del Ser and Veethi Vyas were involved in the development, deployment and analysis of Wave 1 of this survey.