Education, Employment and Earnings of Secondary School-Leavers ...

sample of 50 completers from each of the two years were randomly selected fromeach school to comprise a total of 1000 junior secondary school completers.Once initial lists of sampled students were collated, research teams attempted to traceeach individual’s current location. Tracing selected individuals began at the schools,where staff members and school records provided some information. The researchteams then interviewed and completed questionnaires on all sampled respondentsliving in the vicinity of the schools. In addition to interviewing these respondents theresearch teams asked about the current whereabouts of sampled classmates, where theschool was unable to provide sufficiently accurate information to locate them. Theresearch teams also interviewed parents and other household members of sampledstudents who were living elsewhere, to obtain information on their current location aswell as to collect basic information on the individual in question. Asking familymembers and classmates about the location of sampled students proved to be anextremely productive tracing technique. Once the research teams completed the workin the vicinity of the sampled schools, researchers were sent to interview respondentsin other cities and locations with high concentrations of traced completers. In caseswhere traced respondents lived in remote areas a questionnaire was sent to them forcompletion. 11Table 3 shows the tracer survey response rate to be extremely high, with 97 per centof respondents being traced and their information collected. This compares favourablywith other tracer surveys conducted in developing countries (see for example, Bennelland Ncube (1993, 1994), Kaijage (2000), Narman (1992), Mayanja and Nakayiwa(1997)) and suggests that sample selection problems may be considerably reduced inour case. The main source of the information collected was the traced respondent, andin the majority of cases this was through ‘face-to-face’ interviews. In 50 cases basicinformation on the respondents was collected from the individual’s parents.A questionnaire was completed for each respondent and was designed to elicitinformation on personal background, further education, training and employment11 This was rarely done through the postal service but through intermediaries living near the sampledindividual.9