Qualitative Information Systems WEDC 2004 Conference Paper
In the 1990s IRC developed, together with the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), the Methodology for Assessment (MPA) to assess sustainability of services and to generate gender and poverty sensitive data. Besides streamlining and improving upon the MPA, IRC along with Pragmatix India, has now developed the Qualitative Information System (QIS), a flexible system to store and analyse qualitative data, gathered using the Qualitative Information Appraisal (QIA), for monitoring progress and adaptive management at both project and community levels.
This paper, presented at the WEDC 2004 Conference, presents the background to the methods' development, notes a number of key concerns about maintaining quality of qualitative data and introduces a set of criteria to ensure quality of both the participatory processes and the data collected.
