Taking Busara Online
Envisioning Research in the New World
By Anisha Singh
What are we doing?
COVID-19 has taught us that research needs to be nimble and adaptive, whilst maintaining data quality and reliability. It has also taught us that we need to stop focusing on stop-gap research solutions, and accept that the world has changed forever. Whilst we might be able to restart in-person research activities in the future, the current pandemic has paved the way for rethinking remote data collection in a way that is creative, effective, efficient and of high quality.
And that should be here to stay.
At Busara, we’re expanding our researcher toolbox to meet the needs of the current world. We have set a short term goal of enabling high quality and rigorous remote research implementation that is at the core of the COVID-19 fight, and a longer term vision of developing an experimental and non-experimental toolbox that is driven by efficiency, usability and innovation.
As an organization that has always looked beyond traditional data collection methods, we are soon launching Busara Online to complement our current network of decision labs, human centered qualitative portfolio and our end to end research participant management process. To continue to meet our mission of advancing and applying behavioral science toward poverty alleviation in the Global South, we realize research must overcome exogenous barriers such as COVID-19, and push through.
Our focus on working with low income populations, means we are not able to transition to digital modes of experimentation and data collection as smoothly as elsewhere in the World. Through Busara Online, we aim to develop interactive experiences softwares through apps, websites, offline tools, and ‘how to’ guides to take our unique offerings remotely. We’re working on building a remote end to end research process, including participant recruitment, identification, intervention delivery, experiment implementation, qualitative & quantitative data collection and participant incentive disbursal to empower us to continue to study, and understand our populations of interest.
What will it take?
Building Busara Online has meant a shift in the way we think about strategy, collaboration and data to enable us to realize our vision.
Shift in Strategy: From Project first to Product first
New research tools, or tweaks to existing research tools at Busara have typically been designed to fit a specific study’s needs. Whether it was repurposing a public bus to be a mobile lab to conduct intervention testing with vulnerable and last mile populations in India (read more, here) or developing a Smart Duka app (read more, here) to train small business owners on inventory and financial management — we have remained project demand driven in our approach to developing new tools. As researchers, we’re always looking at plugging research gaps and finding innovative and practical ways to do that. Expanding the number of tools we can draw from has led us to a more proactive approach and flipped the process on its head — we’re now filling gaps in research tools. This should help us move from tools that satisfy a project need to those that are at peak effectiveness, and efficiency thereby sacrificing less from remote data collection and building financial efficiencies too — a definite long-term win.
Shift in Collaboration: From sequential to iterative
Busara Online is a collaborative initiative between our quantitative research, qualitative research, design, and software teams — teams that usually work independent of each other. When teams need to work together on a project, each team is brought in at different stages, with clear hand-offs between teams, and each has its own work-plans and deliverables. When teams check in with each other, it’s more to discuss challenges that have arisen, troubleshoot where the software doesn’t work and align on timelines — everyone still has a distinct part to play in the process. One of our early learnings has been to force people from the different teams together early on and use a larger vision or ‘master plan’ to fuel collaboration. We’ve tried to replace the sequential coordination process with one in which all teams are involved from the get go. This means simple things, involving software managers in discussions about recruiting research participants, involving experimental researchers in thinking about photovoice methods, and ensuring everyone has full visibility over the whole initiative.
Shift in Research: From short to long-term focus
Bringing different teams together also means thinking about research differently. In projects, researchers spend a lot of time planning implementation and collecting pilot data so that everything is near perfect by the time the main study launches. In software development, programmers test ‘dirtier’ versions and follow a more iterative process based on feedback loops even once the main application has been developed and launched. Harmonizing this distinction requires thinking of research differently and harnessing testing and data for longer-term learning.
We’ve brought our testing focus to some of our remote strategies too — we plan to test different messaging for remote participant recruitment, and various incentive structures for agent based recruitment, whilst also building in data quality parameters into our tools that can be monitored across time. For example, continually capturing time spent on each screen for experiments built on OTree software (an experimental program) and implemented remotely through a browser can be compared to average time spent when participants play similar links in a live lab setting — this can form part of a continuous data quality check process and ensure continuous tweaks to implementation strategies. We envision moving away from a ‘tried and tested’ best research solution to building sustainable feedback loops that ensure we keep trying and keep testing.
In the spirit of adapting to a COVID-19 world together, we’ll continue to share with you what we’re developing, where we are failing and most importantly, what we are learning along the way. We’re also looking to hear what you are doing, what has worked and what we should be looking out for. Please feel free to reach out to us by sending an email to contact@busaracenter.org with the subject line ‘COVID RESPONSE.’
Anisha is a Research Engagement Director and is interested in all things experimental. She leads the research portfolio at Busara which is the bridge between academia and consulting, as well as, focuses on developing a network of decision labs to contribute to evidence based approaches in the Global South. She is passionate about taking research beyond a ‘cultural and gender lens’ and bringing context, cultures and gender to the forefront of research designs.
