Symposium 'Measuring Material Wellbeing in Low-Income Contexts: Survey Methods and Recent Innovations'
- For whom
- Employees , Students
- When
- 23-11-2026 from 11:00 to 12:15
- Where
- Auditorium A, Sint-Pietersplein 7, 9000 Ghent
- Language
- English
- Organizer
- Department of Economics - Faculty of Economics and Business Administration
- Contact
- melina.oosterlinck@ugent.be
Research on efficient methods to measure consumption expenditure and material wellbeing in low-income settings, applied to rural Kenya.
Measuring consumption expenditure is the gold standard for assessing material wellbeing, poverty, and development programme impacts in low-income settings, but it requires substantial survey time and resources. This creates a trade-off between sample size and measurement precision, which can affect statistical power.
This paper examines the relationship between survey resource requirements and measurement precision, and develops a framework for optimising precision in experimental impact evaluations.
The approach is illustrated through an impact evaluation in rural Western Kenya, where an optimised consumption survey module achieved reliable measurement while requiring an average of just 12 minutes per respondent.