Measuring socio-economic status in Kenya

I was just screwing around with some data we collected a bit ago. In a nutshell, I’m working to try to improve the way we measure household wealth in developing countries. For the past 15 years, researchers have relied on a composite index based up easily observable household assets (a la Filmer/Pritchett, 2001).

Enumerators enter a households and quickly note the type of house construction, toilet facilities and the presence of things like radios, TVs, cars, bicycles, etc. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) is then used to create a single continuous measure of household wealth, which is then often broken into quantiles to somewhat appeal to our sense of class and privilege or lack thereof.

It’s a quick and dirty measure that’s almost universally used in large surveys in developing countries. It is the standard for quantifying wealth for Measure DHS, a USAID funded group which does large surveys in developing countries everywhere.

First, I take major issue with the use of PCA to create the composite. PCA assumes that inputs are continuous and normally distributed but the elements of the asset index are often dichotomous (yes/no) or categorical. Further, PCA is extremely sensitive to variations in the level of normality of the elements used, so that results will vary wildly depending on whether you induce normality in your variables or not.

It’s silly to use PCA on this kind of data, but people do it anyway and feel good about it. I’m sure that some of the reason for this is the inclusion of PCA in SPSS (why would anyone ever use SPSS (or PASW or whatever it is now)? a question for another day…)

So… we collected some data. I created a 220 question survey which asked questions typical of the DHS surveys, in addition to non-sensitive questions on household expenditures, income sources, non-observable assets like land and access to banking services and financial activity.

The DHS focuses exclusive on material assets mainly out of convenience, but also of the assumption that assets held today represent purchases in the past, which can act as pretty rough indicators of household income. So I started there and collected what they collect in addition to all my other stuff.

This time, however, I abandoned PCA and opted for Multiple Correspondence Analysis, a technique similar to PCA but intended for categorical data. The end result is similar. You get a set of weights for each item, which (in this case) are then tallied up to create a single continuous measure of wealth (or something like it) for each household in the data set.

Like PCA, the results are somewhat weak. The method only captured about 12% of the variation in the data set, which sort of begs the question as to what is happening with the other 88%. However, we got a cool graph which you can see up on the left. If you look closely, you can see that the variables used tend to follow an intuitive gradient of wealth, running from people who don’t have anything at all and shit in the shrubs to people who have cars and flush toilets.

We surveyed three areas, representing differing levels of development. Looking at how wealth varies by area. we can see that there is one very poor area, which very little variation to the others which have somewhat more spread, and a mean level of wealth that is considerably higher. All of this agreed with intuition.

“Area A” is known to be very rural, isolated and quite poor. Areas B and C are somewhat better though they are somewhat different contextually.

My biggest question, though, was whether a purely asset based index can truly represent a household’s financial status. I wondered if whether large expenditures on things like school fees and health care might actually depress the amount of money available to buy material items.

Thus, we also collected data on common expenditures such schools fees and health care, but also on weekly purchases of cell phone airtime. Interetinngly we found that over all the two were positively correlated with one another, suggesting that higher expenses do not depress the ability for households to make purchases, but found that this relationship does not hold among very poor households.

There is nothing to suggest that high expenses are having a negative effect on material assets among extremely poor households located in Area A at all. It might be the case that there is no relationship at all. This could indicate something else. Though overall there might not be a depressive effect of health care and school costs on material purchases, they might be preventing households from improving their situation. It might only be after a certain point that the two diverge from one another and households are then able to handle paying for both effectively.

Also of interest were the similar patterns found in the three areas.