Expenditure and Consumption Survey, PECS 2007 - Palestine

Abstract --------------------------- THE CLEANED AND HARMONIZED VERSION OF THE SURVEY DATA PRODUCED AND PUBLISHED BY THE ECONOMIC RESEARCH FORUM REPRESENTS 100% OF THE ORIGINAL SURVEY DATA COLLECTED BY THE PALESTINIAN CENTRAL BUREAU OF STATISTICS The basic goal of the Household and Consumption Survey is to provide a necessary database for formulating national policies at various levels. This survey provides the contribution of the household sector to the Gross National Product (GNP). It determines the incidence of poverty, and provides weighted data which reflects the relative importance of the consumption items to be employed in determining the benchmark for rates and prices of items and services. Furthermore, this survey is a fundamental cornerstone in the process of studying the nutritional status in the Palestinian territory. The raw survey data provided by the Statistical Agency were cleaned and harmonized by the Economic Research Forum, in the context of a major project that started in 2009. During which extensive efforts have been exerted to acquire, clean, harmonize, preserve and disseminate micro data of existing household surveys in several Arab countries. Geographic coverage --------------------------- The survey data covers urban, rural and camp areas in West Bank and Gaza Strip. Analysis unit --------------------------- 1- Household/family. 2- Individual/person. Universe --------------------------- The survey covered all the Palestinian households who are a usual residence in the Palestinian Territory. Kind of data --------------------------- Sample survey data [ssd] Sampling procedure --------------------------- THE CLEANED AND HARMONIZED VERSION OF THE SURVEY DATA PRODUCED AND PUBLISHED BY THE ECONOMIC RESEARCH FORUM REPRESENTS 100% OF THE ORIGINAL SURVEY DATA COLLECTED BY THE PALESTINIAN CENTRAL BUREAU OF STATISTICS Sample and Frame: ============ The sampling frame consists of all enumeration areas which enumerated in 1997 and the numeration area consists of buildings and housing units and has in average about 150 households in it. We use the enumeration areas as primary sampling units PSUs in the first stage of the sampling selection. The enumeration areas of the master sample were updated in 2003. Sample Design: ========= The sample is stratified cluster systematic random sample with two stages: First stage: selection a systematic random sample of 120 enumeration areas. Second stage: selection a systematic random sample of 12-18 households from each enumeration area selected in the first stage. Sample strata: ========= The population is divided by: 1-Region (North West Bank, Middle West Bank, South West Bank, Gaza Strip) 2-Type of Locality (urban, rural, refugee camps) Target cluster size: ============ The target cluster size or "sample-take" is the average number of households to be selected per PSU. In this survey, the sample take is around 12 households. Sample Size: ======== The calculated sample size is 1,714 households, the completed households were 1,231 (812 in the west bank and 419 in the Gaza strip). Mode of data collection --------------------------- Face-to-face [f2f] Research instrument --------------------------- The PECS questionnaire consists of two main sections: First section: Certain articles / provisions of the form filled at the beginning of the month, and the remainder filled out at the end of the month. The questionnaire includes the following provisions: Cover sheet: It contains detailed and particulars of the family, date of visit, particular of the field/office work team, number/sex of the family members. Statement of the family members: Contains social, economic and demographic particulars of the selected family. Statement of the long-lasting commodities and income generation activities: Includes a number of basic and indispensable items (i.e., Livestock, or agricultural lands). Housing Characteristics: Includes information and data pertaining to the housing conditions, including type of shelter, number of rooms, ownership, rent, water, electricity supply, connection to the sewer system, source of cooking and heating fuel, and remoteness/proximity of the house to education and health facilities. Monthly and Annual Income: Data pertaining to the income of the family is collected from different sources at the end of the registration / recording period. Assistance and poverty: includes questions about household conditions and assistances that got through the the past month. Second section: The second section of the questionnaire includes a list of 55 consumption and expenditure groups itemized and serially numbered according to its importance to the family. Each of these groups contains important commodities. The number of commodities items in each for all groups stood at 667 commodities and services items. Groups 1-21 include food, drink, and cigarettes. Group 22 includes homemade commodities. Groups 23-45 include all items except for food, drink and cigarettes. Groups 50-55 include all of the long-lasting commodities. Data on each of these groups was collected over different intervals of time so as to reflect expenditure over a period of one full year, except the cars group the data of which was collected for three previous years. These data was abotained from the recording book which is covered a period of month for each household. Cleaning operations --------------------------- Raw Data ======= Data editing took place through a number of stages, including: 1. Office editing and coding 2. Data entry 3. Structure checking and completeness 4. Structural checking of SPSS data files Harmonized Data ============ - The Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) is used to clean and harmonize the datasets. - The harmonization process starts with cleaning all raw data files received from the Statistical Agency. - Cleaned data files are then all merged to produce one data file on the individual level containing all variables subject to harmonization. - A country-specific program is generated for each dataset to generate/ compute/ recode/ rename/ format/ label harmonized variables. - A post-harmonization cleaning process is then conducted on the data. - Harmonized data is saved on the household as well as the individual level, in SPSS and converted to STATA format. Response rate --------------------------- The survey sample consists of about 1,714 households interviewed over a twelve months period between (January 2007-January 2008).1,231 households completed the interview, of which 812 were from the West Bank and 419 households in Gaza Strip; the response rate was 71.8% in the Palestinian Territory. Sampling error estimates --------------------------- The calculations of standard errors for the main survey estimates enable the user to identify the accuracy of estimates and the survey reliability. Total errors of the survey can be divided into two kinds: statistical errors, and non-statistical errors. Non-statistical errors are related to the procedures of statistical work at different stages, such as the failure to explain questions in the questionnaire, unwillingness or inability to provide correct responses, bad statistical coverage, etc. These errors depend on the nature of the work, training, supervision, and conducting of all the various related activities. The work team spared no effort at the different stages to minimize non-statistical errors; however, it is difficult to estimate numerically such errors due to absence of technical computation methods based on theoretical principles to tackle them. On the other hand, statistical errors can be measured. Frequently they are measured by the standard error, which is the positive square root of the variance. The variance of this survey has been computed by using the "programming package" CENVAR Data appraisal --------------------------- The impact of errors on the data quality was reduced to the minimal due to the high efficiency and outstanding selection, training, and performance of the fieldworkers. Procedures adopted during the fieldwork of the survey were considered a necessity to ensure the collection of accurate data, notably: 1) Develop schedules to conduct field visits to households during survey fieldwork. The objectives of the visits and the data that is collected on each visit were predetermined. 2) Fieldwork editing rules were applied during the data collection to ensure corrections were implemented before the end of fieldwork activities 3) Fieldworker were instructed to provide details in case of extreme expenditure or consumption of the household. 4) Postpone the questions on income to the last visit at the end of the month 5) Validation rules were embedded in the data processing systems along with procedures to verify data entry and data editing.