Illustrative: a "Household Water Access" form with a categorical "Water source" field feeds an indicator counting households by source, disaggregated the same way.
Data Collection
Form Builder
A data collection form is a contract about what "good data" looks like, decided before the first record is captured — not fixed afterward.
Step 1 · Learn
Understand the concept
Every data-collection instrument makes a set of design decisions that determine data quality long before analysis begins: which fields are required versus optional, which answers come from a fixed list (categorical) versus free text, and which values are validated at the point of entry versus accepted as-is and cleaned later. Fixed-list answers are dramatically easier to aggregate and disaggregate correctly; free text is easier to complete quickly but much harder to analyse consistently afterward.
A well-designed form also anticipates what it will need to FEED — if an indicator will be computed from a field, that field's categories need to match exactly what the indicator expects, decided at design time, not reconciled after months of inconsistent free-text entries.
How METRA GET supports this
Forms are defined per organization from a field-type palette (text, number, categorical, checkbox group, repeatable section, and more) and can feed indicators directly through a mapped field, so a form response can update a computed indicator without a second manual entry step.
Field-level validation and required-field rules are configured at design time, so bad data is caught at the point of capture, not discovered later in a report.
From concept to your own project
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Data Collection
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