Young Lives: School Survey, Ethiopia, 2016-2017

<div>The Young Lives study is an innovative long-term project investigating the changing nature of childhood poverty in four developing countries. The study is being conducted in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam and has tracked the lives of 12,000 children over 25 years, from infancy to adulthood, and through seven rounds of data collection. The five initial survey rounds (Round 1-5) were administered in person and were followed by Round 6, which consisted of five phone calls conducted in 2020 and 2021 as part of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Listening to Young Lives at Work: COVID-19 Phone Survey</span>. The latest in-person survey round, Round 7, was conducted in 2023 and 2024 in Ethiopia, Peru and India only.</div><div><br></div><div>Round 7 did not take place in Vietnam due to changes in governmental procedures on the international transfer of personal data. Additionally, during the data collection for Round 7, an armed conflict broke out in parts of the Amhara region in Ethiopia. For this reason, a shorter and simplified Round 7 questionnaire was conducted over the phone for those respondents who were living in the affected sites at the time of the Round 7 fieldwork. In total, 2,038 in-person interviews and 205 phone interviews were conducted in Ethiopia.</div><div><br>Round 1 of Young Lives was conducted in 2002 and surveyed two cohorts of children born seven years apart, aged 1 year old (Younger Cohort, YC) and 8 years old (Older Cohort, OC) at the time of the first survey round. Round 2 returned to the same children in 2006 when the YC and OC were aged 5 and 12 years old, respectively. Round 3 surveyed the same children again in 2009 at ages 8 years and 15 years, Round 4 surveyed them four years later in 2013 at the age of 12 and 19 years old, Round 5 took place in 2016 when the YC and OC were aged 15 and 22 years old, and Round 6 surveyed them in 2020-2021 at 19-20 and 26-27 years old. Round 7 took place in 2023 when the YC and OC participants were respectively 22 and 29 years old, with some of them becoming parents themselves.</div><div><br></div><div>The 2020 phone survey consists of three phone calls (Call 1 administered in June-July 2020; Call 2 in August-October 2020 and Call 3 in November-December 2020) and the 2021 phone survey consists of two additional phone calls (Call 4 in August 2021 and Call 5 in October-December 2021) The calls took place with each Young Lives respondent, across both the younger and older cohort, and in all four study countries (reaching an estimated total of around 11,000 young people).</div><div><br>The Young Lives survey is carried out by teams of local researchers, supported by the Principal Investigator and Data Manager in each country.<br><br>Further information about the survey, including publications, can be downloaded from the <a href="https://www.younglives.org.uk/" title="Young Lives" target="_blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Young Lives</a> website.</div><div><br></div>
<b>School Survey:</b><br>
A school survey was introduced into Young Lives in 2010, following the third round of the household survey, in order to capture detailed information about children's experiences of schooling, and to improve our understanding of:<ul><li>the relationships between learning outcomes, and children's home backgrounds, gender, work, schools, teachers and class and school peer-groups</li><li>school effectiveness, by analysing factors explaining the development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills in school, including value-added analysis of schooling and comparative analysis of school-systems</li><li>equity issues (including gender) in relation to learning outcomes and the evolution of inequalities within education</li></ul>The survey allows researchers to link longitudinal information on household and child characteristics from the household survey with data on the schools attended by the Young Lives children and children's achievements inside and outside the school. It provides policy-relevant information on the relationship between child development (and its determinants) and children's experience of school, including access, quality and progression. This combination of household, child and school-level data over time constitutes the comparative advantage of Young Lives.<br>
<br>
A further round of school surveys took place during the 2016-2017 school year. The key focus areas for these were:<ul><li>benchmarking levels of student attainment and progress in key learning domains</li><li>effects of school and teacher quality, and school effectiveness</li><li>educational transitions at age 15</li></ul>The 2016-2017 school surveys focused on the level of schooling accessed by 15-year-olds in each country, so including Grade 7 and 8 students in Ethiopia (upper primary level), Grade 9 students in India (lower secondary level), and Grade 10 students in Vietnam (upper secondary level).<br>
<br>
The School Survey data are held separately for each country. The India data are available from the UK Data Archive under SN 7478 and SN 8359, the Vietnam data are available from SN 7663 and SN 8360, and the Peru data have been archived under SN 7479 (no 2016-2017 survey).<br>
<br>
Further information is available from the Young Lives <a class="external" href="https://www.younglives.org.uk/content/school-survey" title="School Survey">School Survey</a> webpages.<br>
<br>