Leveraging Longitudinal Data in Developing Countries Report of a Workshop (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Demographic Analysis of Community, Cohort, and Panel Data from Low-Income Countries: Methodological Issues
Demographic Analysis of Community, Cohort, and Panel Data from Low-Income Countries: Methodological Issues
Pages 53-74
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From page 55... ...
This approach also helps to highlight the essential role played by longitudinal data collection in general as a basis for undertaking structural analysis. Specifically, it is argued that longitudinal data are critical for the modeling and analysis of the temporal antecedents of current behaviors and that clarifying the nature of these temporal antecedents provides important leverage for disentangling the mechanisms underlying demographic behavior.
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From page 56... ...
Like cohort studies, community surveys usually are designed with a fairly narrow purpose in mind, such as the design and testing of a particular set of interventions, but they can later evolve into or provide a basis for more general-purpose data collection activities. MEASUREMENT The role of longitudinal data in measurement, as noted, is one of describing patterns of demographic change.
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From page 57... ...
But retrospective data seem particularly problematic for the evaluation of differential income mobility, because it would be a significant challenge to obtain accurate retrospective reports of income and expenditures. Moreover, because of attrition and household division, it would be difficult to use retrospective data to establish appropriate weights for the purpose of obtaining population estimates of previous income or income growth over a previous interval.
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From page 58... ...
Fortunately, recent experience from several panel surveys has provided substantial insight into the causes and consequences of attrition in panel surveys. The experience of the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS)
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From page 59... ...
Many of these panel data issues apply in some degree to measurement in the context of community datasets and cohort studies. However, there are key differences between panel data and these other forms of longitudinal data collection in the extent to which they are generalizable to large populations.
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From page 60... ...
But the experience of one community is not necessarily representative of other communities, and anyone using data from a single community has no obvious way of obtaining statistical measures of the extent of cross-community variability and thus of how different a particular community is likely to be from some average community in the relevant region. Compared with panel and cohort surveys, community surveys also have particular disadvantages in their treatment of out-migrants.
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From page 61... ...
This likelihood is known in the economics literature as the problem of endogenous program placement and incorporates deliberate attempts to target particular programs to particular areas (such as placing family planning clinics in high-fertility areas see Gertler and Molyneaux, 1994) , the tendency of people to live in places providing services they are likely to use (Rosenzweig and Wolpin, 1988)
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From page 62... ...
A comparison of the fertility behavior of a given woman before and after the introduction of a family planning clinic is likely to be less informative about the effects of the family planning program than a comparison between women of similar ages at two points in time. Indeed, what appears to be the earliest application of this approach to the evaluation of demographic programs considered the effects of family planning expenditures on fertility at the level of the district in Taiwan (Schultz, 19731.
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From page 63... ...
By deliberately tracking entrants, exits, and relevant behaviors in a particular community, researchers can address problems of shifting population and compare appropriate groups at different points in time. They are also able, in the context of a communitybased survey, to deliberately design interventions, such as the Matlab family planning program in rural Bangladesh (see Menken and Phillips, 1990)
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From page 64... ...
Set against these positive attributes is the relatively limited geographic coverage generally provided by community-level surveys. The spatially correlated variables and logistical considerations that place program villages in close proximity to each other could produce random shocks that yield misleading estimates of program effects.
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From page 65... ...
A debate is currently under way in the field of empirical economics about the merits of structural analysis as defined here. One view claims that longitudinal data, at least when coupled with sufficient naturally or artificially introduced experimentation, substantially limits the need for structural analysis.]
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From page 66... ...
that incorporate maternal fixed effects suggest that the latter interpretation is correct: the estimates indicate that the program led to an approximately 20 percent drop in mortality for the children of a given woman. Because mothers with relatively low risks of child loss were among the first to adopt the family planning program, high-risk mothers were differentially represented among the children born after the introduction of the program, thereby masking the favorable effects of the program on mortality risk when viewed from an aggregate perspective.
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From page 67... ...
Thus a correlation between the distribution of unearned income and household allocations net of total income need not imply that the unitary household model must be discarded in favor of a more complex alternative incorporating bargaining. Analysis of this question of whether control over resources affects household allocations is more palatable, however, if individually allocatable consumption or nutritional data are available over time along with measures of unanticipated shocks to income.
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From page 68... ...
Recent game-theoretic models oftransfer behavior have suggested that, given the difficulty of writing formal enforceable contracts governing transfer behavior, one should expect transfers to exhibit credit-like aspects in the sense that transfers between two households would be negatively autocorrelated across time. Longitudinal transfer data from panel datasets in South Asia tend to support this conclusion (Foster and Rosenzweig, 2001b)
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From page 69... ...
Cohort studies also provide a sample of the relevant social network within a study's cohorts but provide very limited information on social contacts across cohort lines. Whether this loss is important will depend critically on the nature of the social influence being studied.
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From page 70... ...
The fundamental difficulty with analyzing interrelated choices is that it is difficult to imagine, at least in the cross section, an exercise in which one manipulates one such choice without directly affecting the other. The advantage of longitudinal data is that, given the appropriate history dependence, it may be in fact possible to simulate the desired experiment.
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From page 71... ...
The extent to which this potential is realized varies greatly according to the ways in which the data are collected, the purpose of the analysis, the methodologies employed, the substantive issues being considered, the statistical and survey capacity of the area being examined, and the availability of other data sources in that area. It is not clear that it is desirable to focus data collection in any one particular way.
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From page 72... ...
72 ANALYSIS OF COMMUNITY, COHORT, AND PANEL DATA by setting the value of ct2to some level ct2* and then considering the effect of an increase in ct2*
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From page 73... ...
Molyneaux 1994 How economic-development and family-planning programs combined to reduce Indonesian fertility. Demography 31 (1)
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From page 74... ...
Frankenberg, and J.P. Smith 2001 Lost But Not Forgotten: Attrition in the Indonesian Family Life Survey.
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