This post is a reflection on the implementation of our remote COVID-19 insights in Indonesia study based on reflections with the team of researchers (13 researchers including 8 Empatika core team members).

Conducting remote research over nine months and experimenting with new tools was a great opportunity for us and our researchers. However, it was not without challenges. As many of the study families live in rural or even remote areas, technical issues such as phone or internet signal were constant challenges. These challenges also made using some of the tools like photo sharing more difficult, and made it harder for researchers to find good times for contacting families. Using remote approaches also made it more difficult to maintain consistent contact with families and other community members, particularly as many people could be quite busy with their own activities throughout the day. As many researchers were interacting with multiple families during the study, often from different communities, this sometimes made scheduling and maintaining consistent contact all the more difficult.

We were also learning as we went along about the best communication strategies for staying engaged with families throughout the study period. While strategies like texting almost everyday worked well with some families, with other families this contributed to them getting tired with some of the discussion. We also found that some families got tired talking about some of the more specific study issues such as health, especially if they didn’t consider these issues to be priorities in their day-to-day lives. Some family members would say things like, ‘You’re asking about this again?’ We needed to continue to adapt and adjust based on the situation (not so different from being in the field). Still, some researchers were able to get even closer to their families through this study process. And for families that researchers hadn’t been in touch with recently (before the study started), all appreciated getting to reconnect.

Certainly one of the lessons for us as researchers was that it was important to be flexible with our communication style, strategies, and timing. We learned that due to the challenges of scheduling, this meant that we needed to be ready to have conversations with families, or to be contacted by them, at almost any time of the day. This could be quite tiring (for example, receiving phone calls late in the evening, or while cooking dinner), and so we also had to learn how to manage our own stamina and energy throughout the study process. And although we did make it to the end of the study, there is certainly still much for us to learn on managing remote research processes.

Although phone signal and internal availability did present challenges with many families, compared to just a few years ago this has greatly improved and most of the participating families now have at least one smartphone. Utilizing tools such as photo and video sharing, screenshots, group chats, and video calls enabled both researchers and participants to be more creative in exploring and sharing stories. Around 33 of the 45 families involved in the study shared photos with their researcher! A mother in Lombok Timur was inspired by one of the prompt exercises and sent the researcher over 10 videos of her talking with children and other mothers about different topics related to the study. Not only did this mother feel that topics like education and health were important, she thought that making the videos was a fun thing to do. Some researchers were able to create WhatsApp groups with university students, while one researcher, after gaining consent, was able to join an existing WhatsApp group of parents and hear about their experiences with distance learning. New approaches like these inspired other researchers and reiterate the need for us to be creative and constantly innovating.

Still, what many of our researchers really wanted after finishing this study was an opportunity to get back to doing some face-to-face research! Up until the pandemic, our work has focused primarily on immersion research, and so many of us are at heart field researchers. Doing fieldwork is how we get refreshed and re-motivated, so we hope that the pandemic situation will continue to improve. There’s just no substitute for an in-person experience (this is one reason why you may have noticed that we have continued to try to include some fieldwork on current studies), although we know that we have to be flexible, especially now. We also want to keep experimenting with other research tools since, for example, some of the tools we used remotely for this study could also complement in-person approaches to research.

When doing immersions, often one of the best but also bittersweet moments is when we are leaving and have to ‘pamit’ and say goodbye. Families often ask us, ‘When will you come visit again’? During this remote study, we also faced this difficult question, and just like in-person, all we could do is say that although we don’t know when, we hope to have a chance to visit again sometime. If we’re able to get through this pandemic and actually have this opportunity with any of these families, it will probably now be an even sweeter experience.

We are very thankful for the relationships with the participating families and appreciate all of the time families gave as part of this study. We are also grateful for the opportunity to conduct this study and to be able to share these families’ perspectives and experiences during this pandemic.

This study is a follow-up to our 2019 study, working with UNICEF, on post-disaster Multi-Purpose Cash Assistance (MPCA) in Central Sulawesi and North Lombok. The study built on the tools and learning from the 2019 study while also adding baseline and endline components along with a survey to complement the qualitative insights. The MPCA program in East Lombok provided cash assistance in nine villages to pregnant women and families with children under 7 years of age. The study explored how people’s livelihoods were affected by the 2018 earthquake, along with COVID-19, how people perceived the MPCA assistance including the assistance process and mechanism, how families spent the money, and the impacts that it had on their lives.

UNICEF initiated the study as part of ongoing learning about the use of cash in emergencies and more generally in an effort to strengthen and promote Adaptive Social Protection in Indonesia. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit Indonesia right as the first disbursements were starting in some of the East Lombok communities, this also provided an opportunity to more directly compare MPCA beneficiary experiences to those receiving the government’s COVID-19-related social assistance.

The arrival of COVID-19 also meant that we had to adjust the study methodology from our initial plan to help ensure the safety for both study participants and our research team. Following an initial pause in the fieldwork, our team had discussions with the UNICEF team in Jakarta, UNICEF field staff, and village leaders in East Lombok in July of 2020 about the feasibility of re-starting the fieldwork (MPCA disbursements were also paused from April to mid-July). At this point we also developed our COVID-19 field protocols and after receiving the go-ahead from UNICEF and the East Lombok government, our research team took to the field for what would be Empatika’s first experience conducting fieldwork during the pandemic (you can read more about these initial experiences in this post).

Check out the full report and research brief on the Our Work page.

The following are some of the key insights from the study across the three primary topics:

Livelihoods and Social Assistance

• Most families experienced a decline in income. Many migrants that returned home remained unemployed; informal labourers were significantly affected due to issues such as less infrastructure and renovation projects in villages; kiosk owners near schools suffered reduced sales because schools were closed; and farmers faced lower crop prices particularly from May to August 2020. Only farmers who own land, civil servants and salaried employees that felt least affected financially by the pandemic. (click read more to see the rest of this post)
  

Empatika kicked off 2021 with a study about malaria programs in Eastern Indonesia, focusing on the social factors that influence how people access malaria prevention and treatment services. Even though malaria programs have been delivered nationwide since 1959, with a more recent target to achieve malaria-free status by 2030, malaria cases remain high especially in the eastern part of Indonesia. This study aims to provide deeper insights and a better understanding of community experience in order to strengthen existing malaria interventions, particularly communication strategies that can encourage positive behaviour in using malaria prevention-related services.

For this study, the Empatika team visited four districts including Southwest Sumba, NTT; Mimika and Jayapura, Papua; and Manokwari, West Papua. Within each district, our team spent time in two different communities.

The study was carried out in two stages including adapted immersions along with follow-up People Driven Design (PDD) workshops. The first stage using adapted immersions was done in mid-January—the method was adjusted from Empatika’s typical immersion approach to mitigate COVID-19 risks to both participants and researchers. For these adapted immersions, researchers visited communities from morning until evening over a period of days but spent nights at a guesthouse close to the community rather than staying with families. During this stage, we focused on understanding the local context and people’s behaviour in relation to malaria prevention and treatment.

The second stage included People Driven Design (PDD) workshops in communities that took place in early March. PDD is an approach based on the principles of human-centred design with an emphasis on directly engaging people in identifying their own behaviour challenges, setting goals, and developing their own ideas to encourage positive behaviour change. For these workshops we focused on one community each across the four districts. Building on the rapport built throughout the adapted immersions, Empatika researchers held interactive discussions with a group of community members and health providers over a period of five days. We discussed insights from the adapted immersions  including people’s thoughts about their priorities, facilitated them to brainstorm, develop and try out local solutions that could encourage positive behaviour change related to accessing malaria treatment and prevention.

Through the PDD process, we were very encouraged by community members and health providers’ enthusiasm to promote positive behaviours in their communities. Currently, the behaviour change solutions that they co-designed continue to be trialed, promoted and refined by the community members and health providers. We hope this study as well as the groups’ local solutions can give valuable feedback to improving malaria programs in the future.

We hope to be able to share some of the study's outputs in the next few months.

One of the key topics highlighted in our Longitudinal Remote Insights Gathering study on Children and Their Families’ Experiences during the COVID-19 Pandemic was the challenges for children’s learning and education. This included the many struggles faced by students, teachers, and parents in shifting to different types of ‘distance learning’ and the education system’s overall lack of preparedness for implementing distance or digital learning on a larger or long-term scale.

Empatika was excited to be able to explore some of the gaps of the digital learning situation in more detail in a new study working once again as the local partner in Indonesia with Quicksand Design Studio (our second recent collaboration). This situational analysis study aims to provide insights on the digital learning landscape in Indonesia, using an equity lens to highlight key disparities that exist among different regions and socio-economic backgrounds. We combined secondary research, expert interviews with people from the Ministry of Education and Culture and EduTech Companies (such as Zenius and Sekolahmu), as well as virtual interviews with teachers, students, and parents from Papua, East Java, West Sulawesi, Central Sulawesi, East Nusa Tenggara, Maluku, and West Java. The report provides an overview of the access to and quality of digital learning along with insights on internet connectivity and affordability; the availability of digital learning devices; the relevance and content of digital platforms; and the digital skills of students and teachers.    

Some of the insights from the study include:

• The pandemic has resulted in an upsurge of platform and content innovations within the education space, by both the government and the private sector. However, little awareness and perceptions of low quality content have limited its uptake.
• Private EdTech platforms are mostly focused on private schools and final-year school students. While some government programmes have come up to address private sector gaps, the needs of vulnerable communities are not yet adequately met, especially in the case of special needs students.
• The shift of education outside the physical space in classrooms has led to challenges for monitoring teaching and learning performance.
• Despite numerous initiatives to improve the poor internet connectivity across the archipelago, progress is slow and a large proportion of the population still does not have adequate internet connectivity to learn online.
• Limited access to affordable quality internet and poor availability of appropriate digital devices makes learning from home less conducive for most students - especially those in remote and poor settings like 3T areas.
• The Government's efforts to provide internet packages have faced limitations in design and implementation, limiting its Uptake.
• Students have strong potential for digital learning, as many of them are 'digital natives'. Despite this, they lack adequate 'digital skills' that would prepare them for the 'digital economy'.
• Many students struggle to adjust to this new way of learning, and their parents lack the capacity to adequately support them.
• Inadequate support for teachers to transition to digital learning has posed challenges for them to adapt. This is accentuated by their poor formative training and limited pre-existing digital skills.
• Government interventions focused on teachers, have thus far been top-down in their approach and largely failed to include teachers in their design and formulation.
  

Check out the full report here.

Let's see, was there anything special about 2020?
?!  :-)

What a year! In addition to the very extraordinary Covid situation, our team added 3 new members in 2020, started on our very first piece of remote research, and began working with a number of new partners. Overall, we are very grateful that we have been able to continue working and that our team has remained largely healthy :-).
 
We started working from home in the middle of March and our projects were put on hold soon afterward. Two of these were eventually cancelled, although we were lucky that for one of these we had already done enough of the fieldwork that we were still able to write up some findings for the client. After a few weeks of feeling a bit stuck and unsure, we were able to get moving again with some internal training and then by starting to compile Covid-relevant insights from our previous studies in Indonesia and Uganda.

As we looked to expand on these initial insights in Indonesia by reaching out to previous study families, we discussed possibilities that eventually resulted in a series of learning discussions with the Pulse Lab Jakarta team. We then received support from a client to turn our outreach with families about the impacts of Covid into a full study that would be conducted remotely over a period of over six months (this will be finishing up next month).
 
It was around this time that we also began developing Covid-19 field safety protocols and standards as we prepared for the possibility of being able to do some fieldwork again. As some of our projects that had gone on hold began to re-start their activities in July, we had our first trial at conducting fieldwork during the pandemic as part of a study in East Lombok. Since that experience, we have continued to conduct some fieldwork while also working on other remote research.
 
Along with the collaborations with our clients and teams like Pulse Lab, 2020 also brought possibilities with new partners like Quicksand. We appreciate the continued optimism and support from partners like these along with the spirit and energy of everyone in our team including our research associates.
 
We hope that you and those close to you stay healthy, and we look forward to a 2021 that will hopefully bring back a greater sense of normalcy before too long.

As part of developing COVID-19 related protocols and brainstorming internally for how to adjust and adapt to the current situation, our team also had the opportunity to brainstorm with the Pulse Lab Jakarta (PLJ) team during a series of sharing sessions beginning in June of this year. We have collaborated with PLJ on previous studies including a study on Rural to Urban Migration in Indonesia. One of the things we have always liked about PLJ is that while a lot of their work is cutting-edge, they maintain an emphasis on making data work for people, sharing people’s stories and presenting data and insights in interesting and easily digestible ways.

The initial idea for the sharing sessions was to explore how to approach conducting quality qualitative research remotely, especially for more remote areas and/or with people who might have more limited access to technology or more limited experience in using it. Through these sharing sessions we hoped to develop up-to-date and contextualized approaches for doing research remotely and how to incorporate different tools and technologies in the process.

The sharing sessions were done over an initial four week period, with one session each week facilitated by PLJ. In the first session we discussed some of the possible methods that can be used for remote research that we use as a basis for the upcoming sessions. Based on some of the possible remote work we anticipated doing, we narrowed down the discussion to: Phone Interviews; Photo/Video elicitation; and Diaries.

Next we talked about what aspects we need to consider when using these methods (or any others). This included identifying the participants, the length/duration for the data collection, best practices for approaching participants, ensuring a 'safe space' for participants and other considerations such as ethics.

The next week, we dove into the three methods to try and see what kinds of challenges we may face during the research process, particularly when working with people in more rural areas as we often do for our studies. Some of the challenges we highlighted included:

• participants' with limited technology familiarity
• bad/inconsistent phone signal
• not being able to see non-verbal gestures and cues
• ensuring participants feel comfortable (also relates to consent)
• participants availability
• participant retention over the study duration
• the possibility to misinterpret visuals (send by the researcher or participant), along with others.

After identifying these challenges, we discussed possible ways that we can tackle them if we face them during research, and any ways that we could avoid them with better prep or strategies.

The final of the first four sessions we framed around designing a remote study (using the same three methods) looking at Covid-19 impacts and social assistance. For this we spent time identifying some of the possible research questions, discussing what are the insights we are looking for and trying to contextualize the methods. For contextualizing the methods, we discussed technology (what kind of media or platform can be appropriately used, network coverage, etc.); personality (how to ensure participants to feel safe, what kind of communication approach, etc), and time (consent, when is the best time to contact, how to arrange the schedule, etc) considerations. For each item we tried to emphasize putting participants first.

All in all, these sessions were an exciting learning experience. Certainly from our end, our team left the sessions inspired and they helped broaden our understanding of the possibilities and considerations for remote research. And like any research methods, it will be a continuous learning process!

After these sharing sessions, each organization was also able to test out many of the things we discussed during our own respective remote research studies. For Empatika, we officially started our Covid-19 Remote Qualitative Insights Gathering study for UNICEF in July and are currently working on the second of three rounds in this longitudinal remote study (learn more below or click here). For PLJ, they spent much of October and early November working on a remote mixed methods study with UN Women and Gojek on ‘Leveraging Digitalization to Cope with COVID-19: An Indonesian case study on women-owned micro and small businesses’ where they worked with small/micro business owners in Jakarta and West Java (see their case study report here).

In mid-November, our teams then came together again for a follow-up session where we were able to share some of our experiences with remote research so far. We talked about what surprised each of us so far with carrying out remote research, what were the biggest challenges we’ve faced, and what were our lessons learned.

PLJ also found that from the client side, it seemed that there was a greater expectation that the research could be conducted much quicker than a regular study since interactions were just done remotely (and our Empatika team would agree that remote interactions does not necessarily equal faster/easier data collection).

From the Empatika side, our team found that carrying out research remotely is much more time consuming and draining (physically and mentally) than most of us anticipated. Some of the more specific challenges included:

• Inability to read gestures, to easily triangulate information with others, and to more easily have others involved in conversations
• For many it was difficult to match calls and WhatsApp/other interactions with participants’ variable routines and this required researchers to allocate chunks of time every day during the most intensive part of the interactions (each round done primarily over two weeks). This was especially true as many researchers are contacting multiple families.
• It was more time consuming than anticipated to explain some of the multimedia tools that we designed to participants
• And of course all of this was influenced by the fact that most of our participants are living in rural areas with inconsistent phone/internet signal.

In the end, we found that we’ve learned a lot through carrying out remote research and it has shown us that there are even more possibilities for the tools/methods available to us, and that these possibilities could also include mixing both remote and direct interactions with participants. Still, it’s clear that we’re still very much a team that likes to be in the field and interacting with people face-to-face. Hopefully the end of this pandemic will be in sight soon!

One of the interesting reflections during our discussion was how in some cases the extra distance between participants actually helped to reduce any unnecessary discussion between participants. We also found that visuals were still really helpful to make the interactions more engaging for participants.

All in all, it has been a very fruitful learning experience for our team and we will continue to update our guidelines as needed as the situation changes. Although many of us still miss being able to live directly with people in the field, we are adjusting and adapting to this 'new' situation and are open to other approaches during this pandemic time. Another study we recently started will be experimenting with remote qualitative research. We look forward to sharing some of the experiences from that process soon!

Want to hear directly from some of our researchers about their first experience doing fieldwork during this pandemic time? Have a look at this short clip from the field.

Following the July 2018 earthquake in West Nusa Tenggara and the September 2018 earthquake and tsunami in Central Sulawesi, UNICEF and its partners introduced Multi-purpose Cash Assistance (MPCA) programs as part of their efforts to support recovery in communities. UNICEF commissioned Empatika to understand people's experiences after these disasters, and specifically their perspectives and experiences of the MPC assistance.

For this qualitative assessment our team visited two communities each in Donggala, Palu, and Sigi in Central Sulawesi (May 2019); and two communities in North Lombok in West Nusa Tenggara (July 2019). The insights gathered from the study have helped inform learning for the Cash Working Group and its partners about best practices in MPC assistance during emergencies from the perspectives of beneficiaries.

We used a mix of participatory tools for the study including scoping immersions for context and relationship building; participatory focus group discussions (pFGDs) for exploring the study topics in-depth; and digital storytelling (DST) workshops to help enrich some of the study insights and aid the study partners in promoting continued discussions around the study topics.

During the scoping immersions and pFGDs, our team had in-depth interactions with 216 men and women in these communities, of whom 149 were recipients and 67 were non-recipients of the MPCA. Following this fieldwork, we returned to one community in Sigi and one community in North Lombok in July for conducting DST workshops with a combination of beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries.

The DST workshop in Sigi included 11 mothers along with one grandfather who is the main caregiver for his twin grandchildren. In the North Lombok community, our team conducted two workshops, one in the more central area of the community (five mothers) where we had conducted the pFGDs along with a separate workshop in one of the remote areas of the community (7 mothers) in order to include some women who face significant access issues and who did not receive the MPC assistance. Insights from the finished DST videos are included in the final report, highlighting some of the personal stories as they relate to different study topics.

View the full report or study briefs here.

Some of the key findings from this study included:

• People want cash, although ‘in-kind’ assistance was appreciated right after the disaster before markets resumed normally. Cash expenses, either regular (e.g. gasoline) or additional expenses (as a direct result of disasters like water, cooking utensils) were incurred by families in the first few weeks after the disaster as the immediate assistance provided to most locations was sporadic, unequal and insufficient.
• People prefer receiving cash assistance early on because i. livelihoods were disrupted and families had limited to no earnings to meet expenses, and ii. assistance cash could be used to buy what people needed to fill gaps in external aid.
• People had somewhat limited information about the MPCA programme. Non-recipients of the programme were typically not invited to socialisation sessions nor had clear information about programme plans. Recipients too had limited or unclear information relating to disbursement frequency and dates, and required documentation.
• People thought the house damage criteria for assistance eligibility (as was used in Donggala and Palu) is opaque with levels of damage open to interpretation. Trust in village officials to identify levels of damage correctly was low especially as people were aware of the lack of standard guidelines provided by the government. Targeting based on having young children (targeting mothers of children under 7 years old and pregnant women) seemed to be more accepted.
• People in Central Sulawesi were critical of the programme’s rationale for using bank accounts as a way to encourage financial inclusion. Most people do not have savings and they do not expect to continue using their accounts in the future. Deductions made by the bank (to meet minimum balances) was also an issue of contention.

The study team also plans to return to the two communities in North Lombok once it is safer to do so to share some examples of the final study outputs and to discuss the study process from their perspectives.