4.1.4 Output and supervision

The flow between the interviewers, data processors, and data entry staff can be very complicated. It is therefore very important that there be sufficient supervisory personnel who can a) be responsible for the quality of the work done in each step, and b) assure that the work done in that step gets to the next step. Often the biggest problems in large-scale human rights data projects is that there is inadequate coordination between the steps. The interview people sometimes do not talk to the data processing people and so do not know that there is an inconsistency or a problem. If the data entry people do not understand exactly the coding scheme that the data processors use, then the computer-recorded information may not reflect the work that the data processors have done. All of these problems can be avoided if the people in charge of each step communicate well with their counterparts in the other steps.