TY - JOUR T1 - Five questions to consider when conducting COVID-19 phone research JF - BMJ Global Health JO - BMJ Global Health DO - 10.1136/bmjgh-2020-004917 VL - 6 IS - Suppl 5 SP - e004917 AU - Shreya Menon AU - Petra Sonderegger AU - Swetha Totapally Y1 - 2021/07/01 UR - http://gh.bmj.com/content/6/Suppl_5/e004917.abstract N2 - Summary boxShifting one’s research modality from traditional face-to-face methods to phone surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic requires careful considerations of trade-offs.Our experience shows that before undertaking phone surveys, researchers need to clear a high bar of additionality, ensure their target populations can be representatively reached by phone, deploy short and clear surveys while putting in measures to reduce bias and increase response rates, minimise unique risks to respondents including around consent and distress response, and lastly be willing to invest what it takes to make stakeholders listen.An inability to meet these critical requirements should give researchers pause before conducting phone-based research.These findings and the evolving research on the effectiveness of different research modalities during the pandemic will likely hold implications for future research conducted by phone, especially in crisis contexts.The shift in research modality to phone surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted tensions between the need for real-time data on the one hand and high-quality, generalisable data on the other. We present five questions for evaluating the trade-offs involved when navigating this shift (figure 1). We draw on prior research, our participation in the COVID-19 Research Network (CORE Net), and the range of phone research conducted by CORE Net from April to November 2020. The latter included four surveys across India on a range of topics and targeting diverse beneficiary populations. The largest of these was our survey from April-June 2020 to assess the efficacy of COVID-19-related governmententitlements across 47 000 low-income households in India. We also conducted asurvey of 17 000 women and men on the gendered impacts of Covid-19 fromOctober-November 2020, results of which are forthcoming. Additional CORE Netstudies referenced in this commentary include an ongoing study from April 2020by IDInsight on COVID-19 knowledge, behaviour change, and economic effects, aswell as a study from … ER -