Validation Relaxation: A Quality Assurance Strategy for Electronic Data Collection.

A strategy of removing validation rules on electronic data capture platforms can be used to create a set of detectable data errors, which can subsequently be used to assess group and individual enumerator error rates, their trends over time, and categories of data collection that require further training or additional quality control measures. This strategy may be particularly useful for identifying individual enumerators or systematic data errors that are responsive to enumerator training and is best applied to questions for which errors cannot be prevented through training or software design alone. Validation relaxation should be considered as a component of a holistic data quality assurance strategy.