Sunday in the Field: Lessons on Community-Based Data Collection in Rural Ghana
By Dr Irene Honam Tsey from WINGS-4-FGS partner University of Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS)
There is a particular kind of research lesson that no methodology textbook teaches you. It is the kind you learn standing in a half-finished building, asking a group of teenagers to speak up over the sound of three simultaneous church services coming through the walls.
This is that story and what it taught me.
Setting the Scene
We were in the field for data collection for the Female Genital Schistosomiasis (FGS) awareness baseline qualitative data collection in one of the selected communities in Ghana. Before any data collection can begin, protocol demands the right steps: visiting the chief and seeking permission. We did all of this. The chief received us graciously, granted his blessing, and an assembly man and another community leader were designated to help us identify eligible participants.
But there was a problem none of us had fully anticipated, and it had everything to do with the day of the week. It was Sunday.
The Sunday Factor: A Researcher’s Blind Spot
One of the community leaders was diplomatically candid: “You should have come very early in the morning.” It was around 9am. For a Sunday in most settings in Ghana, that was already late. In many Ghanaian communities across the country’s predominantly Christian belts, Sunday is not simply a rest day. It is a day of full community mobilisation around church. By mid-morning, a significant proportion of the population, including the young people we were hoping to recruit, were in church services that would run well into the afternoon.
This is not unique to one community. It is a structural feature of the social calendar in many parts of Ghana that researchers who are urban-based, institution-bound, or simply unaccustomed to field rhythms can easily overlook during the planning phase.
The lesson: Day of week is a sampling variable. In predominantly Christian communities in Ghana, Sunday data collection, unless scheduled for very early morning or late afternoon, risks systematic exclusion of the majority of your target population. This is not just a logistical inconvenience; it is a potential source of selection bias. Those who remain accessible on a Sunday morning may be systematically different from those in church in terms of religious observance, social connectedness, or community integration.
Gatekeepers and the Gift of Honest Warning
The assembly man and the community leader did something invaluable: they told us the truth. They warned us. They did not simply comply and let us find out the hard way. That kind of honest engagement from community gatekeepers is itself data. It signals a community leadership structure that is invested in the quality of the research process, not merely its performance.
Researchers should create space for this kind of feedback. A brief orientation conversation with community contacts before beginning recruitment and not just a formality of securing permission, but a genuine exchange can surface scheduling realities, community calendar events, and local norms that no ethics form or study protocol captures.
The lesson: Community gatekeepers are not just permission-givers. They are knowledge holders. Build time into every field day to ask: Is today a good day? What are people doing today? Who is likely to be available? And be prepared to actually listen to the answers.
The Venue Problem: Privacy, Power, and the Chief’s Palace
After recruitment came the venue challenge. The chief had generously offered his palace which is a quiet, comfortable space. It was, logistically, an excellent option. We declined it anyway. This was not a slight to the chief’s hospitality. It was a recognition of a fundamental principle in qualitative research: participants must feel free to speak without perceived surveillance or social consequence. Conducting interviews or focus group discussions in the home of the paramount authority in the community — however benevolent that authority may be, creates an implicit power dynamic that can compromise the quality of disclosure, particularly when participants are adolescents aged 15 to 18 discussing sensitive health topics.
For young people in that age bracket, the chief’s palace is not a neutral space. It is a space associated with authority, with hierarchy, with the possibility that what is said may travel. Whether or not that risk is real, the perception of that risk is enough to affect what participants feel safe to share.
The lesson: Venue selection is not a logistical afterthought — it is an ethical and methodological decision. A space that appears convenient for the researcher may be deeply inconvenient for the participant’s willingness to speak. When working with adolescents on sensitive topics, always seek a space that is private, peer-appropriate, and free from association with authority figures — even well-meaning ones.
The Church Noise Problem: When You Run Out of Options
With the chief’s palace declined, the school which is a classic fallback venue for community-based research, was our next hope. But Sunday had claimed that space too, in its own way: a church was meeting nearby, and the noise was inescapable. What we ended up with was an uncompleted building. And what made it work was the resourcefulness of our young participants, who picked up their plastic chairs and relocated without complaint.
Even there, the services followed us through the walls.
We asked our participants to speak up. They did. We adjusted. The data collection proceeded.
The noise presented a temporary challenge, though participants engaged openly and without hesitation once the service disruption resolved. It is worth noting, however, that the conditions of any group discussion including the physical environment, can shape how comfortable participants feel expressing themselves, and this is something the team remained attentive to throughout.
The lesson: Build venue contingencies into your field plan — not one backup, but two. Identify possible locations during a community pre-visit and assess them for noise, privacy, and appropriateness. In communities with active church cultures, Sundays will fill even peripheral spaces with sound. If Sunday data collection is unavoidable, do a sound check of your venue before you begin.
What We Would Do Differently
For the benefit of other researchers navigating similar terrain, here is what this experience taught us to build into future field plans:
- Schedule around the community calendar, not the research calendar. In Christian-majority communities in Ghana, Saturdays and weekday afternoons are generally more productive than Sunday mornings. If Sunday is the only feasible day, begin at dawn. Ideally by 7am, before services begin.
- Pre-visit communities specifically to assess venues. Walk the space. Listen for noise. Ask whether a church meets nearby. Ask what the community looks and sounds like on the day you plan to collect data.
- Have a genuine conversation with gatekeepers before the day. Not a formality, but a working conversation. Ask: “What should we know about this community before we come?” The answers will almost always be more useful than anything in the study protocol.
- For adolescent participants on sensitive topics, location signals safety. A venue that communicates privacy and peer-appropriateness can unlock disclosure that a logistically convenient but authority-adjacent space will suppress.
- Carry flexibility as a field tool. Uncompleted buildings, shaded compounds, or quiet corners of a school block can become adequate venues. The ability to adapt and to bring participants along in that adaptation is itself a research skill.
A Closing Reflection
The young people who picked up their plastic chairs and moved with us that Sunday morning did so without being asked twice. They were cooperative, patient, and present. They gave us what we came for.
The field, in Ghana, will always surprise you. Communities have their own rhythms, their own sacred times, their own hierarchies of space and sound. The researcher’s job is not to impose a schedule on that reality, but to learn to read it.
Plan for the community as it actually is. Not as the protocol imagined it.