Technical Note No. 2. An Assessment of the Young Lives Sampling Approach in Andhra Pradesh, India.
Abstract
Young Lives is a longitudinal research project investigating the changing nature of childhood poverty. The study is tracking the development of 12,000 children in Ethiopia, Peru, India (Andhra Pradesh) and Vietnam through qualitative and quantitative research over a 15-year period.
To fit the main objectives of the project, Young Lives employed a sentinel site sampling method, which is a multistage sampling approach and uses both purposive and probability sampling methods. While households within the sites were selected by a method equivalent to random sampling, the site selection process was not random and over sampling of poor sites took place.
The aim of this report is to assess the chosen sampling methodology for Andhra Pradesh (India) and to analyse the comparability of Young Lives first round data with data from the Demographic and Health Survey 1998/99 (DHS) (IIPS 2000). The DHS is a household survey that provides data for a wide range of monitoring and impact evaluation indicators in the areas of population, health, and nutrition. The DHS 1998/99 provides regionally representative data for Andhra Pradesh. The sample consists of 4,032 women and 3,872 households.
By comparing data from Young Lives and the DHS, the study attempts to answer two questions: (i) what are we looking at in the Young Lives data set? (ii) to what extent is the Young Lives sample reflective of the population of 1-year-old and 8-year-old children in Andhra Pradesh?
The outline of the report is as follows. Section 2 presents the sampling approach that was adopted by Young Lives. Section 3 presents variables used for the comparison and discusses the results of the statistical comparison tests. Section 4 concludes.
Citation
Young Lives, Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, UK. 22 pp.
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