Living Standards Measurement Survey 2005

Four survey instruments were used to collect information for the 2005 Albania LSMS: a household questionnaire, a diary for recording household food consumption, a community questionnaire, and a price questionnaire.

The household questionnaire included all the core LSMS modules as defined in Grosh and Glewwe (2000)1, plus additional modules on migration, fertility, subjective poverty, agriculture, non-farm enterprises, and social capital. Geographical referencing data on the longitude and latitude of each household were also recorded using portable GPS devices. Geo-referencing will enable a more efficient spatial link among the different surveys of the system, as well as between the survey households and other geo-referenced information.

The choice of the modules was aimed at matching as much as possible the specificity of Albania in terms of data needs, as driven by pressing policy questions. Their design (e.g. questions asked, their sequence, units and time-frames used) was also adapted to fit the Albanian reality.

Household membership in this survey is defined as being away from the household for less than six months. Deceased individuals, lodgers, hired workers and servants are never considered household members. Guests who stay with the household for six months and over, infants of less than six months, new arrivals (such as newly weds) are considered household members. The head of the household is always considered a member of the household irrespective of the time s/he spent away from it.

The questionnaire was divided in two sections, and was administered to households in two visits, one section per visit. During the second visit the interviewer would also collect additional information of use for the eventual tracking of the household in the next waves of the panel.

The Diary for Recording Daily Household Consumption (also known as the booklet) was left with the household by the interviewer during the first visit for the household to compile, and collected during the second visit. Upon collection, interviewers took care of checking the entries (also with the help of a checklist provided at the end of the booklet) and correct them as appropriate with the help of the most knowledgeable person in the household.

The diary consists of:
A. A cover page (for metadata information);
B. Instructions for the household on how to record consumption;
C. Fourteen (i.e. one per day) three-part sections for the recording of (1) food products purchased daily; (2) non-purchased food products consumed by the household (e.g. from own production or payments in kind); (3) food eaten outside the home (e.g. at work, in restaurants);
D. A checklist for use by the interviewer with a list of the 14 main food products consumed in Albania.
E. Bread Questionnaire

A specific column was provided for the household to record the ‘reference period’ for any purchases of food. The checklist was compiled by the interviewer, with the help of the most knowledgeable person in the household, upon collection of the diary. Interviewers were instructed to check, for 14 main food staples, whether any consumption of the item had been recorded in the diary. Whenever an item had not been recorded the interviewer would ask the respondent to report whether the item (a) had not been used in the 14 day period, or (b) had been consumed but the household had forgotten to record its consumption, or else (c) had been consumed by the household drawing on stocks purchased or produced outside the 14 day period. If the inclusion of an item had simply been forgotten the interviewer would then fill the appropriate section of the diary by asking the household to recall the details of that consumption. If the household reported consuming an item purchased before the beginning of the 14 day period, then information on the frequency of purchase, quantity, unit of measure and value of the purchase were recorded in the columns provided to this end in the checklist.

Data users should therefore make sure of using the checklist, as well as column 7 in the table on daily purchases, to supplement the food consumption information included in the main part of the food diary. The rest of the questionnaire was filled in two stages. One half of the questionnaire was filled at the initial visit to the household and the other half at the second visit. In order to allow for completion of the cropping season, and the identification of agricultural households, the agricultural module was sent out in the Fall 2005 (to be precise October), only to the households that claimed to have any plots of land or livestock.

The Community Questionnaire Information was collected in the Fall of 2005 for Tirana, Urban (other than Tirana), and Rural areas with a few slightly different questions for each. When using data from these questions the analyst should make sure of integrating information that appears in different variables in the dataset. In a few cases in which a question did not make sense in an urban context the question was only asked in rural communities.

In rural areas the community was normally defined as a village and the inhabited area surrounding it. In urban areas the definition was less straightforward, and it was decided on a case by case basis by the core team and the supervisors with the objective of selecting areas that would be understood as communities by the respondents, from time to time adopting boundaries matching those of administrative partitions of the urban areas, the neighborhood or sector. In Tirana the community was identified with the minibashkia level of the administrative partition of the city.

The supervisors were instructed to administer the questionnaire to a group of persons reputed to be best informed about each module within a community (e.g. teachers for the education questions, doctors or hospital managers for health related ones). Whenever possible, the questionnaire was administered in groups and the prevailing response (in case of differing views) was recorded. When this was not possible, respondents were interviewed separately. In a majority of cases, however, the questionnaire was in practice administered to only one respondent, generally an elected or appointed community leader.

The fourth survey instrument used was the price questionnaire. The price questionnaire was sent out at the same time as the core questionnaire, that is, during May-July 2005, in order to obtain the prices faced by households at the same time that the field work was going on.

Data for 96 different items were collected in each community. Prices were generally collected in only one outlet, except for urban communities for which two or three price observations are available. Thirteen of the latter are urban areas in which the monthly price data collection regularly is done by INSTAT for the consumer price index was used.