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A key challenge in survey research is how to manage fieldwork to maximise sample sizes and balance response rates whilst ensuring that fieldwork is completed on time, within budget and to the highest possible standards. This is particularly demanding when monitoring fieldwork across multiple surveys simultaneously, across time, or across different countries. Effective monitoring requires access to real-time information which can be collected by and shared with multiple stakeholders in a standardised way and responded to in a timely manner. This process often involves researchers who may be several steps removed from the fieldwork, located in a different organisation and even a different country.

Increasingly, fieldwork agencies and survey infrastructures have access to detailed progress indicators collected electronically in the field. Making use of this information requires streamlining the information received by means of fieldwork monitoring systems or dashboards. Developing an effective fieldwork monitoring system is not as straightforward as it may at first appear and raises both methodological and operational questions. Methodological questions include which indicators to use for monitoring, how to combine paradata from multiple sources to generate indicators, and how to use the indicators during fieldwork. Operational questions include how to most effectively present the agreed indicators, which stakeholders the monitoring system should cater for, how often updates should be received, how to implement y interventions, and how the feedback loop between the monitoring team and interviewers in the field should be managed. Thinking about these questions is crucial in ensuring that increased access to real-time data leads to improvements in monitoring and responding to issues in the field. The data should facilitate informed decision-making about how best to realise often competing goals of fieldwork delivery, quality and costs.

This session aims to bring together those working with fieldwork monitoring dashboards or other tools to share their experiences and learning. We welcome presentations from different stakeholders (fieldwork agencies, research infrastructures, academic institutes, etc.) and survey types (national and cross-national, cross-sectional and longitudinal, conducted in any mode). Presentations could outline how the types of methodological and practical issues raised above have been addressed and demonstrate how the choices made have had an impact, good or bad, on capacity to monitor fieldwork. Presentations may also provide systematic reviews of one or more performance indicators results of implementing adaptive and responsive designs informed by monitoring dashboards, and experimental and simulation studies on fieldwork monitoring.