In-depth interviews

Table 2: Frontline worker sample by state and occupation

We selected our respondents from pre-existing contact lists. For the primary/secondary caregiver survey, we chose respondents in each state using a database previously created by Kantar and containing over 500,000 phone numbers that had been collected and updated over the past five years. The database footprint spans India and its characteristics align broadly with the 2011 Census. Respondents were selected across multiple districts in every state to avoid clustering errors. For the frontline worker survey, respondents were randomly selected from lists provided by respective state government departments. In each state, we received lists of ASHAs (and in Tamil Nadu, of VHNs) from the National Health Mission (NHM) state offices. We also received contact lists of Anganwadi workers from Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) state offices. With few exceptions (see below), these state offices shared complete lists of ASHAs, Anganwadi workers, and VHNs employed in their states, which we used to randomly draw samples for our interviews. We applied a buffer of 2 4x (depending on the sub-groups) while survey sampling to account for nonresponses and to ensure that we hit our sample and sub-sample targets in the frontline worker survey. For some frontline worker sub-groups complete data were not available. Therefore, we adopted workaround solutions to construct our samples. For Anganwadi workers in Assam, the database we used to create our sample had details for ~54,000 Anganwadi workers of a total of ~61,000 employed in the state, due to data availability limitations. Every district was represented in this database, such that we could reasonably assume that those workers not included in the database were distributed randomly across the state. For Anganwadi workers in Odisha, we relied on a national database of Anganwadi workers available at the ICDS website to construct our sample of 500 (4x our sampling frame for this sub-group). Of these 500 workers, phone numbers were available for 260 (including replacements where possible). We proceeded with data collection using this buffer sample of 260 Anganwadi workers.

We conducted 60-minute in-depth phone interviews with 30 primary / secondary / frontline workers to better understand their experiences with caregiving for young children during the pandemic. These interviews were inspired by a human-centred design (HCD) methodology, which focuses on gaining a conducted 10 in-depth interviews before our survey began during August September 2020,