From design to practice: how can large-scale household surveys better represent the complexities of the social units under investigation?

Antoinette Kriel, Sara Randall, Ernestina Coast () and Bernadene de Clercq

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The way in which ‘the household’ is defined and operationalised in surveys and census data collection has long been criticised as unable to adequately capture the complexities of the social units within which people live. In a South African national survey on household wealth (HWS) a definition of the household was used to rep-resent the ways in which South African households arrange themselves financially. Here we report on a qualitative study in which 36 households originally included in the HWS were re-interviewed to collect detailed data on household financial links and dependencies. Households with more complex structures, which represent the majority of household types in South Africa, were very poorly represented, and possible reasons for this are explored. We analyse and discuss the HWS research process in the light of the findings of this study, and propose ways to improve large-scale survey design and data collection, drawing on perspectives from multiple disciplines.

Keywords: quantitative household survey concepts; organisational and structural complexity; representativeness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Etude de la Population Africaine, 2014, 28(3), pp. 1309-1323. ISSN: 0850-5780

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