validators. The aim of the training was to develop and refine trainees’ skills in acquiring informed consent, building rapport with respondents, collecting and recording data, and analytical reasoning. Trainings were held for eight hours each day and, over the course of 10 days, transitioned gradually from exclusive classroom learning to field trainings with short debriefing sessions. Field trainings provided trainees with opportunities to practice the skills and techniques they had learned.

Like any qualitative study, we believe staff recruitment and training to have been among the most important tasks and also the largest start-up cost of this method.

# **F.3 Approach**

For each respondent, validators tried to determine whether the respondent had engaged in any of the measured behaviors, even once, in the two weeks preceding the respondent’s survey date, as the survey asked about behaviors occurring during the two weeks prior to the survey. We found it optimal for validators to visit each respondent four times, on four separate days, with each visit or “hangout session” lasting approximately three hours. The validator aimed to begin hanging out the day after subjects completed their quantitative surveys and to conduct all four visits in the days following the respondent’s endline survey date.

Validators deliberately avoided the feeling of a formal interview and would typically accompany respondents as they went about their business.<sup>21</sup> Validators sometimes took notes during visits, but only in isolated areas out of sight from the respondent.<sup>22</sup> The idea follows from basic principles of ethnography, which seeks to study subjects in their natural settings, similar to those the researcher hopes to generalize about. The intent is to reduce the sense of being in an experimental situation, which ethnographers perceive as creating bias.

The main approach was to engage in casual conversation on a wide range of topics, including the six target topics/measures. The target topics were raised mainly through indirect questions while informally chatting. For example, validators typically started conversations with discussions of family. This was both customary among peers in Liberia and a sign of respect and interest in respondents’ lives. It was also a stepping stone for discussing the target behaviors—either because the validator can discuss an issue in their family (someone engaging in one of the activities) or how the respondent’s family feels about their current lifestyle and circumstances.

In general, validators found it helpful to tell respondents stories or scenarios about another person or themselves, related to the target measures, then steer the conversation to get information about how respondents had behaved in similar situations, eventually discussing the past two weeks. Validators were careful to present these behaviors and incidents in a non-stigmatized light, for instance by discussing a friend who stole in order to get enough to eat, or how they themselves had periods of homelessness or used drugs and alcohol. Validators found these personal stories (all of which were truthful) and genuineness were essential to building rapport and trust.

Validators might hold these conversations once or twice over the three hours, spending perhaps twenty or thirty minutes in conversation each time, to avoid unnaturally long or awkward conversations. The validator spent the remainder of the three hours in the general vicinity, observing

> 21On the first visit validators would obtain verbal consent. We designed the consent script to be informal, and explained that the goal of hanging out with the respondent was to talk about some of the same things they discussed in the survey. In addition to this verbal consent, the formal consent form that preceded the recent survey said that qualitative staff may come and visit them again to gather more information.

> 22e.g. in a toilet stall or teashop. If validators were unable to find a secluded area in which to take notes, they sometimes recorded information in their cell phones, pretending to send a text message.

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