Household Report Cards

To be able to accurately serve and represent the settlements PVS needed to better understand the demographics of the communities.  Therefore, as I mentioned before, we were asked to conduct a large-scale needs assessment of three of the five settlements surrounding Jodhpur. There are upwards of 300 people in each settlement, so we needed a fast and efficient way to gather this information, while also keeping in mind that the majority of these families are illiterate. We researched and used the Participatory Rural Appraisal approach, which relies heavily on visual cues in order to reach as many people as possible. 

From our research we created a Household Report Card that used mostly pictures and checkboxes to gather information from a variety of categories. We then held a training session for two community leaders from each settlement, and taught them how to conduct the survey in their respective communities.

We now have all the cards back and are in the process of analyzing them… And it’s been interesting.  The understanding varied greatly across the volunteers, so each settlement has a few questions that will not be very useful for us. It’s too bad that we didn’t get all the information that we wanted, but really more than anything I think this was an amazing learning experience for us. The International Education program at NYU is great, but very theoretical, so this experience has been the missing practical component, and I am learning so much from my time here.

I’m sure you’re all wondering what our card ended up looking like, so here it is:


Front (dealing specifically with individual information)















 Back (dealing with household information)