Regional MICS4 Workshops - About To Begin

The Regional MICS Workshops, a major feature of the MICS programme, are due to begin in July, 2009. The first workshop will be held in Bangkok.

In MICS4, three workshops will be organized in each region. The first workshop will be on "Survey Design", where country teams (comprised of the country survey coordinator, the country sampling expert, and the UNICEF focal point) will be attending. Countries that have decided to carry out a MICS survey, as well as those undecided, will be invited. The workshop will be a general introduction to every aspect of MICS implementation and coordination, including the introduction to survey tools (questionnaires), governance issues, sampling, training, fieldwork, data processing and archiving. Sampling will receive special attention, since an international sampling expert will be present to assist countries in drafting their sample designs.

This will be followed by a second workshop, this time on "Data Processing". Countries that have decided to carry out a MICS survey will be attending, with two data processing experts. The workshop will be devoted to training country teams on how to modify the standard MICS data entry and editing programs (in CSPro) to correspond to their questionnaires, adopt standard tabulation programs (in SPSS), and learn the basic about survey archiving. Countries at two different stages of implementation may be attending: Preferably, those that have not started fieldwork but have final or near-final questionnaires (so that they can use the data entry programmes simultaneously during fieldwork), and those few countries that have completed MICS3 fieldwork but may be seeking assistance on tabulations.

A third and final workshop will be organized around the themes of Reporting, Archiving, Dissemination, and Further Analysis (full name of the workshop will be decided later). To this workshop, countries that have completed their final reports or are close to completion will be invited. In other words, countries will come with their draft final reports and data sets, and other materials that have been already produced. The first of these workshops is not expected until the third quarter of 2010.

The 3-workshop plan assumes that between the second and third workshops, after the completion of fieldwork, countries will travel to Regional Offices to finalize their tabulations and/or finalize survey reports. These can be in the form of mini-workshops, since it may be possible to invite more than one country at a time to the regional office.


[a]