Task Team on pilot surveys, Pretoria

— cross-fertilization between Mexico, the Philippines and South Africa

A meeting of the Metagora Task Team on Pilot Surveys was held on 14-16 July 2004 in Pretoria and hosted by the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC). The meeting was chaired by Mrs Maxine Reitzes (South Africa).

Explaining the choices made in the survey design

As part of the interaction and cross-fertilization processes that are inherent to Metagora, the meeting aimed at gathering together the local co-ordinators and leading experts from the three countries where pilot surveys on human rights issues are currently being designed and will soon been implemented: Mexico (survey on ill-treatment), the Philippines (survey on the rights of indigenous people) and South Africa (survey on the human rights dimensions of the national program of land restitution). Although the characteristics, size and distribution of the targeted populations are quite different in the three countries, the planned pilot surveys present a number of common conceptual, methodological and technical problems. The meeting allowed experts to discuss both the various specific challenges of each survey and the common problems.

The presentation of the work carried out in the three countries highlighted three aspects that appear to be crucial for a comprehensive definition of the issues to be measured as well as for the subsequent design and formulation of questionnaires:

• an accurate, sound internal analysis of the policies at stake (particularly strong in South Africa);
• the inter-institutional and participatory process that allows to identify the relevant

  Discussion on draft questionnaires

  issues to be measured (particularly impressive in the Philippines);
• the use of preliminary in-depth narrative interviews of actors involved in human rights violations, either as perpetrators or as victims, that allows to figure out circumstances and aspects that should be taken into account when formulating the questionnaire (particularly fruitful in Mexico).

On the basis of these presentations, the attendants discussed in-depth survey plans and survey design in the three countries, followed by the most focused and important part of the meeting: the mutual detailed review of draft survey questionnaires. The opinions of independent experts helped all three teams to make a step forward in the development of their tools and methods, before presenting more advanced versions in the second meeting of the MPG and then applying them in their respective surveys.