The National Statistics Office (NSO) of the Ministry of Finance and Treasury is ready to conduct the second Solomon Islands Demographic Health Survey in 2015 (2015 SIDHS).
SIDHS Communication Advocacy Affairs in a statement yesterday said this is the second Solomon Islands Health and Demography Survey to be conducted in Solomon Islands, after the first DHS was successfully conducted in 2006/2007.
“This survey is going to be conducted and coordinated in partnership with the Ministry of Health and other stakeholders in Solomon Islands.”
The primary objective of the 2015 SIDHS is to provide updated information for policy makers, planners, researchers and programme managers, to use when planning, implementing, monitoring, evaluating population and health programmes within the country.
All the information collected and collated from this second 2015 SIDHS is going to specifically provide detailed information on fertility, infant and child mortality, family planning, maternal and child health, children and women’s nutrition, knowledge of HIV and AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections (STI’s), child labour and child discipline, malaria and women’s empowerment among others.
The 2015 SIDHS sample design follows the 2006/2007 design with 5 domains of reporting including Honiara, Guadalcanal, Malaita, Western and Others.
In each domain, a minimum of 1,000 women aged 15-49 is going to be interviewed according to the NSO requirements to produce reliable results. The sample is going to cover a total of 4,223 households selected from 211 enumeration areas from the 5 main domains.
Government Statistician Mr Douglas Kimi kindly calls on all good Solomon Islanders to make welcome the SIDHS 2015 enumerators when they knock on your doors to do the interviews in March next year. Information collected from the selected households is going to be kept confidential and is going to help donors and government to plan good developments for this country.
“All households in Solomon Islands have equal chances of selection to participate in the survey, your cooperation is highly appreciated and NSO, SIDHS 2015 team is looking forward to working closely with the households in conducting the survey”.
The survey is going to use three main DHS standard questionnaires will include tools such as household questionnaire, woman questionnaire and man questionnaire. The household questionnaire is basically used to list down all usual members of each households and including visitors, demographic information about households and members. Information collected on household characteristics is to going to be used to identify eligible women and men to be interviewed.
The woman questionnaire is used to interview women aged 15-49 years in the selected household about population and health related issues. Man questionnaire is utilized to interview men aged 15 years and over from the sub-selected households.
The 2015 SIDHS was made possible through the financial support provided by Australia Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) of 72%, the Solomon Islands Government with 27.97% and UNICEF support is 0.03%.
Technical assistance at different stages of the survey will be provided by the Statistics for Development Division (SDD) within the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC).
Reference to the 2015 SIDHS work plan – planning, budgeting and survey designs were done early this year, 2014 while procurement of equipment and recruitment progressing later in the year.
The pretest training and training of fieldworkers is planned for early 2015 with the fieldwork operation planned to commence in April 2015.
The survey fieldwork operation will cover six months period.
