Development of the surveys has been a difficult process of trade-offs. Most people who have participated in surveys on ICT use can probably identify with the feeling that these surveys are often extremely long, some taking up to two hours to complete. And researchers will admit that once the data is collected, a large proportion of it goes unused, it is never analyzed. We’ve had to make some difficult choices about the scope of our surveys of public access ICT venue users and operators. There are several relevant issues that we would like to explore, from the demographics of public access users to the impact of usage on users’ health, education and participation in civic life. The first draft of the user survey compiled over 60 pages of questions on several of these interesting issues - a survey that could potentially take more than three hours to complete. Since our goal is to keep the surveys less than one hour long, we needed a systematic approach to decide which questions would be included in the final version. To do this we prioritized the research questions we would investigate with the surveys, developed hypotheses to go with each research question, and identified potential indicators to test each hypothesis. This process enabled us to select questions for the instruments that are directly related to our research questions, and provided a means to make the hard decisions of eliminating questions that are “interesting” but fall out of the scope we have defined for the surveys.

The research questions for the surveys are:

1. What is the demographic profile of public access ICT users?
2. Apart from public access ICTs, what other information and communication resources do public access ICT users have?
3. How do public access ICT users perceive their ICT skills and what are their ICT use comfort levels?
4. Why do people go to public access ICT venues?
5. What do people do at public access ICT venues?
6. How accessible are public access ICT venues and services to different types of populations?
7. How do the design, services, and operations of public access ICTs affect usage patterns?
8. What types of venue policies do public access ICT operators view as inhibiting their ability to provide information and services that they believe users want?
9. What do public access users see as the impacts of using public access?
10. What outcomes can be associated with public access ICT use in different domains?
11. Does public access ICT use have indirect impacts?
12. What is the value of public access ICT to users?
13. What is the cost of providing public access ICTs?

The survey instruments are in the final stages of editing before being translated into local languages and piloted. Results from the pilots will inform the final survey instruments, which will be rolled out in early 2010 in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, and the Philippines. We are looking forward to sharing the final instruments and additional insights about our survey development process.