About Us
Aureolin Research, Consultancy, and Expertise Development (ARCED) Foundation is registered in Bangladesh under the Society Registration Act, 1860 at the RJSC and started its operation from 2013. ARCED Foundation collaborates with national and international organizations, agencies, institutions, and academicians to implement experimental, quasi-experimental and non-experimental researches.
Most of the research and studies that ARCED carried out were methodologically embedded on Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT), quasi-experimental methods, cross-sectional design, Most Significant Changes for qualitative analysis, approach following either or mixture of simple random, stratified, clusters or systematic sampling. Almost all of its studies involve statistical and econometrics tools and models using Stata, SPSS, Python or R along with Google Sheets, MS Excel and Access for basic data management. ARCED has part-time and full-time in-house professionals as well as a professional setup to secure experts from outside – that entails both national and international professionals.
Data collection and quality control
To ensure the highest level of data quality and security, we use digital tablets to collect the data, as they enable a quick survey turnaround time, minimize data entry errors and ensure automated data security. ARCED has extensive experience and expertise in Open Data Kit (ODK) based surveys as well as SurveyCTO/ODK based recourses development. ODK/SurveyCTO allows automatic checking for consistency and constraints which will reduce the data entry error. We sometimes use a false launch pilot to assess the capacity of each field staff member to perform the tasks in a real-life context. The false launch pilot also serves as an opportunity to fine-tune some of the questions and SurveyCTO codes. Aside from that, based on project characteristics we start with soft-launch where the surveys start from a smaller scale and we take time to identify the best strategy to launch the surveys at full scale. We employ a number of methods in maintaining data quality and security that are implemented before, during, and after the surveys.
ARCED’s contribution to open knowledge
ARCED evolves through innovations and creativity, and we believe in going far together. Therefore, we keep on sharing the resources the talented ARCED team develops. All the technical tools developed by ARCED team are shared on ARCED’s GitHub page which is accessible by anyone from the world. The technical tools include innovative templates and technical tools to solve particular problems. Some of the examples are:
odksplit: A Stata program that converts the multiple response data collected and exported using ODK and/or SurveyCTO in a usable form and labels variables and values. This program is published in Boston College Statistical Software Components (SSC) archive to be available for the wider Stata user community.
odkmerge: A Stata program that can be sued to easily merge datafiles when data downloaded in “long” format from SurveyCTO/ODK.
arcedfold: A Stata program that creates a standard folder and file structure for ARCED’s projects and creates basic do files templates.
SurveyCTO plug-ins: ARCED has developed numbers of SurveyCTO field plug-ins to allow smooth data collection allowing more flexibility in digital data collection.