Expenditure and Consumption Survey, PECS 2004 - 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 were enumerated in 1997; the enumeration area consists of buildings and housing units and is composed of an average of 120 households. The enumeration areas were used 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 a stratified cluster systematic random sample with two stages: First stage: selection of a systematic random sample of 299 enumeration areas. Second stage: selection of a systematic random sample of 12-18 households from each enumeration area selected in the first stage. A person (18 years and more) was selected from each household in the second stage. Sample strata: ========= The population was divided by: 1- Governorate 2- Type of Locality (urban, rural, refugee camps) Sample Size: ======== The calculated sample size is 3,781 households. 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. Detailed information/formulas on the sampling design are available in the user manual. 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. Second section: The second section of the questionnaire includes a list of 54 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 50-54 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. Cleaning operations --------------------------- Raw Data ======= Both data entry and tabulation were performed using the ACCESS and SPSS software programs. The data entry process was organized in 6 files, corresponding to the main parts of the questionnaire. A data entry template was designed to reflect an exact image of the questionnaire, and included various electronic checks: logical check, range checks, consistency checks and cross-validation. Complete manual inspection was made of results after data entry was performed, and questionnaires containing field-related errors were sent back to the field for corrections. 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 3,781 households interviewed over a twelve-month period between January 2004 and January 2005. There were 3,098 households that completed the interview, of which 2,060 were in the West Bank and 1,038 households were in GazaStrip. The response rate was 82% in the Palestinian Territory. Sampling error estimates --------------------------- The calculations of standard errors for the main survey estimations enable the user to identify the accuracy of estimations 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 all various related activities. The work team spared no effort at 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.