2006 LIVING CONDITIONS AND MONITORING SURVEY

5TH EDITION

The 2006 surveys was designed to cover a representative sample of about 20,000 non-institutionalised private households residing in both rural and urban parts of the country. A total of 1,000 Standard Enumeration Areas (SEAs) were drawn from a total of 16,717 SEAs nationwide in both surveys. It is important to note that the CSO had employed different sample survey methodologies at different times when conducting the surveys. With the exception of the 2002/2003 survey which used a longitudinal sample, all the remaining surveys have used a cross-sectional sample of household

The sampling frame used for the 2006 LCMSs was developed from the 2000 Census of Population and Housing. The country is administratively demarcated into nine provinces, which are further divided into 72 districts. The districts are further subdivided into 150 constituencies, which are in turn divided into wards. For the purposes of conducting household based surveys, wards are further divided into Census Supervisory Areas (CSAs), which are further subdivided into Standard Enumeration Areas (SEAs). The SEAs constituted the Primary Sampling Units (PSUs).

In order to have reasonable estimates at district level and at the same time take into account variation in the sizes of the districts, the survey adopted the Optimal Square Root sample allocation method (Leslie Kish, 1987). This approach offers a better compromise between equal and proportional allocation, i.e. small sized strata (districts) are allocated larger samples compared to proportional allocation. However, it should be pointed out that the sample size for the smallest districts was still fairly small; hence the need to examine the confidence intervals for the district-level estimates in order to determine whether the level of precision is adequate. The allocation of the sample points to rural and urban strata was approximately proportional. The distribution of the sample for the LCMS 2006 were initially the same but changed after the latter was adjusted to take into account the precision parameter.

During the 2006 survey, listing of all the households in the selected SEAs was done before a sample of households to be interviewed was drawn. In the case of rural SEAs, households were listed and stratified according to the scale of their agricultural activity. Therefore, there were four explicit strata created at the second sampling stage in each rural SEA: the Small Scale Agricultural Stratum (SSS), the Medium Scale Agricultural Stratum (MSS), the Large Scale Agricultural Stratum (LSS) and the Non-Agricultural Stratum (NAS). For the purposes of the surveys, seven, five and three households were selected from the SSS, MSS and NAS respectively. The large scale households were selected on a 100 per cent basis. The urban SEAs were explicitly stratified into low cost, medium cost and high cost areas based on CSO's and local authorities' classification of residential areas. From each rural and urban SEA, 15 and 25 households were selected respectively. However, the number of rural households selected in some cases exceeded the prescribed sample size of 15 households depending on the availability of large scale farming households. The selection of households from various strata was preceded by assigning each listed household with sampling serial numbers. The circular systematic sampling method was used to select households. The method assumes that households are arranged in a circle (G. Kalton, 1983) and the following relationship applies:
Let N = nk
Where:
N = total number of households assigned sampling serial numbers in a stratum
n = total desired sample size to be drawn from a stratum in an SEA
k = the sampling interval in a given SEA calculated as k=N/n.