Technical Note No. 4. An Assessment of the Young Lives Sampling Approach in Vietnam.

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. Since 2002, the study is following two cohorts in each study country.

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. The aim of this report is to assess the chosen sampling methodology. Therefore, the report investigates the representativeness of Young Lives data by comparing selected variables from the Young Lives sample with those from two nationally representative surveys: the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey 2002 (VLSS 2002) and the Demographic and Health Survey 2002 (DHS 2002). The aim of the comparison is to establish to what extent the Young Lives sample in Vietnam is a poorer or richer sub-population.

The structure of this report is as follows. Section 2 describes the sampling design adopted by Young Lives Vietnam. Section 3 discusses the representativeness of Young Lives' first round data in Vietnam. Section 4 and 5 compare the Young Lives sample with the DHS sample using different methodologies including comparison of distribution of wealth index by household. Section 6 concludes.

Citation

Young Lives, Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, UK. 29 pp.

Technical Note No. 4. An Assessment of the Young Lives Sampling Approach in Vietnam.

Published 1 January 2008