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We established a one-page survey questionnaire, which could be filled by the surveyed
person, anonymous, focusing on the individual's category and essential knowledge and
practice indicators on HIV/AIDS prevention.
We pre-tested this questionnaire on some workers who had lunch at the Plant Site
restaurant. This pre-test enabled us to validate the use of the questionnaire.
Initially written in Malagasy, the questionnaire was then translated to French, English,
Chinese and Thai for other Plant Site workers who were more familiar with these languages.
In order to determine and compare the companies’ performances, we chose the LQAS
method (Lot Quality Insurance Sampling) to select the employees to be surveyed per
company.
The LQAS method is a research method frequently used in the public health sector
9
, which
gives 92% of precision in the measurements from a random sample of 19 elements per area.
In this survey, each subcontractor company at the Plant Site was considered as a supervision
area where we randomly selected 19 employees.
In fact, every company had its own list of employees, received the same tools for the HIV
prevention activities (training manual, posters, booklets, boxes of condoms) and had the
same structure to sensitize their employees (HSE Managers, HSE supervisors, regular
Toolbox).
We asked the selected employees’ consents through their HSE managers.
Any Plant site company having more than 19 employees could participate in the survey.
Selection of the 19 employees per company was made as follows:
From the company’s list of employees, we deducted each company’s total number of
employees; we then calculated the sampling interval to select 19 employees from the list.
We made the first selection with a random number, and then from sample to sample
selected the 19 employees to be surveyed.
We added an additional list of random numbers of employees in case some of them, from
the initial selection, were not available for the survey.
We submitted this list to the HSE Manager who gathered the 19 selected employees,
including the eventual replacements of those unwilling or unavailable. These selected
employees were gathered by the HSE Manager to a place and at a time of the company’s
convenience.
We explained, in advance, the objectives and the filling out procedures of questionnaire to
all participants, and then distributed them to everybody, who completed them anonymously.
It generally took 5 minutes for each individual to fill out the questionnaire; and we
immediately collected all completed surveys from the company.
We thus conducted the survey on employees of the Plant Site companies from December 14
to December 19, 2009.
