Phone surveys are a rapid and cost-effective way to collect primary data for research, monitoring and evaluation purposes. But for these data to be precise, reliable and unbiased, women's perspectives must be accurately represented. Throughout 2020, we conducted seven household surveys in rural India to understand households' experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic and contemporaneous relief programmes. Given social distancing protocols, we conducted these surveys over the phone, using household phone numbers collected during earlier, face-to-face research. Analysing metadata from these surveys (along with women's responses to questions about phone use), we determine how gaps in phone access inhibit women's representation in phone surveys. We find that the prevalence of male management of household phones significantly reduces access to female respondents. This is a problem for two reasons. Firstly, men are usually the first to pick up the phone: in two surveys in which we tracked the gender of the person who picked up, men picked up 63.2% and 71.1% of the time, respectively. Moreover, only a small minority of those we reached by phone were able and willing to pass the phone to a household member of the opposite gender, when prompted (with no statistically significant difference between pass rates for women and men). This low immediate pass rate, in combination with low female pickup, led to fewer women respondents. As such, we recommend that researchers dedicate time and resources to taking appointments and making call-backs to reach more women. We also show that the use of female enumerators improves households' willingness to participate in women-centred surveys, and call for more investment into female enumerator teams.

中文翻译：

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不完整的信号：在印度农村的手机调查中捕捉女性的声音。

电话调查是一种为研究、监测和评估目的收集原始数据的快速且具有成本效益的方式。但要使这些数据准确、可靠和公正，就必须准确反映女性的观点。整个 2020 年，我们在印度农村进行了七次家庭调查，以了解家庭在 COVID-19 大流行和同期救济计划中的经历。鉴于社交距离协议，我们通过电话进行了这些调查，使用的是在早期的面对面研究中收集的家庭电话号码。通过分析这些调查的元数据（以及女性对电话使用问题的回答），我们确定了电话接入方面的差距如何抑制了女性在电话调查中的代表性。我们发现男性管理家用电话的盛行显着减少了女性受访者的访问。这是一个问题，原因有二。首先，男性通常是第一个接电话的人：在我们追踪接听者性别的两项调查中，男性接电话的时间分别为 63.2% 和 71.1%。此外，只有少数我们通过电话联系到的人能够并愿意在收到提示时将电话转给异性的家庭成员（女性和男性的通过率在统计上没有显着差异）。这种较低的即刻通过率，再加上较低的女性接机率，导致女性受访者较少。因此，我们建议研究人员投入时间和资源进行预约和回电，以吸引更多女性。