Using machine learning and qualitative interviews to design a five-question women's agency index

Seema Jayachandran, Monica Biradavolu and Jan Cooper

No 15961, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We propose a new method to design a short survey measure of a complex concept such as women's agency. The approach combines mixed-methods data collection and machine learning. We select the best survey questions based on how strongly correlated they are with a "gold standard" measure of the concept derived from qualitative interviews. In our application, we measure agency for 209 women in Haryana, India, first, through a semi-structured interview and, second, through a large set of close-ended questions. We use qualitative coding methods to score each woman's agency based on the interview, which we treat as her true agency. To identify the close-ended questions most predictive of the "truth," we apply statistical algorithms that build on LASSO and random forest but constrain how many variables are selected for the model (five in our case). The resulting five-question index is as strongly correlated with the coded qualitative interview as is an index that uses all of the candidate questions. This approach of selecting survey questions based on their statistical correspondence to coded qualitative interviews could be used to design short survey modules for many other latent constructs.

Keywords: Women's empowerment; Survey design; Feature selection; Psychometrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 D13 J16 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big and nep-cmp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Using Machine Learning and Qualitative Interviews to Design a Five-Question Women's Agency Index (2021)
Working Paper: Using Machine Learning and Qualitative Interviews to Design a Five-Question Women's Agency Index (2021)
Working Paper: Using Machine Learning and Qualitative Interviews to Design a Five-Question Women's Agency Index (2021)
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