Survey of Living Conditions 1995

Design

The methodology that was chosen reflects the purpose of the survey. To balance a desire for a large, representative sample with the expense of a detailed survey instrument, a sample size of 2,016 households was selected. Three separate populations were covered: households in Baku, households outside of Baku and households of Displaced Persons. Within each of those populations, the sample was chosen in such a manner that each household had an equal probability of being selected. At the same time, the logistics of locating the households and conducting the interviews within a specific time frame required that the households be grouped into "work loads" of 12 households each. The size of the workload was determined by the number of interviews that could be carried out in one day by one team of three interviewers and a supervisor.

The Azerbaijan Survey of Living Conditions sample design included 408 households in the eleven raions that make up the city of Baku, 1200 households in the population outside of Baku, and 408 households among the registered Internally Displaced Persons residing throughout the country. This results in an oversampling of the Internally Displaced Persons population and an undersampling of the urban population of Baku. In order to use all data to provide nationally representative estimates, weighting factors must be applied to the data to account for the difference between the population and sample distributions.

Outside of Baku

The most recent data on population came from the 1989 census, the most recent data on number of households was reported in 1994 by the National Statistical Committee. The country is divided into towns, villages of the town type, and villages. Every household is located in one of those three types of population points. A list prepared by the National Statistical Committee contains just over 4,250 of these population points.
To choose the sample outside of Baku, Baku was excluded from this list as were all the population points located in raions of the country currently occupied (Agdam, Xankendi, Xodjali, Xodjvendi, Susha, Kubatli, Zangelan, Kelbadjar, Lachin, Fizuli and Djebrali). The remainder of the country included 3453 population points.
Information on the number of households was not available for all population points, specifically, "villages of the town type" and cities did not have this information. Average household size was calculated for those points that had both population and the number of households and this number was used to impute the number of households for those population points where it was missing. Average household size was 4.25 which is smaller than expected but reflects the fact that numerator is a 1989 statistic and the denominator is from 1994.
First stage of sampling: Using the list of actual and estimated number of households for each population point, 100 workloads were spread across the population points in the following manner:

1. the sampling interval, i, was calculated to be the total number of households outside of Baku divided by 100,
2. the random start, s, was calculated by taking the integer portion of [random number * i + 1],
3. the population point containing the sth household, the (s+i)th household, the (s+2i)th household, etc. were then selected.
4. in the event that more than one interval landed on the same population point, multiple workloads of 12 households were surveyed in that population point. In this manner 100 workloads were distributed in 91 population points.
   Second stage of sampling: In order to select the households within the selected population points, household lists maintained by the administrative office of each Selsoviet were used. Selsoviets are administrative units that cover from one to ten population points. In the population points covered by a single group of 12 households, 16 dwellings were selected--12 to be interviewed and 4 to be used as replacements if necessary. The sampling interval used was the total number of households on the list divided by 16. Each population point had been assigned a randomly generated number with which to calculate a starting point. In population points with more that one group of 12 households, 16 households were selected for each workload and the sampling interval was number of households divided by 16 multiplied by the number of workloads.
   It is possible that a second household with separate finances could occupy a dwelling that was only listed once in the Selsoviet’s list. If an interviewer discovered more than one family living in a single dwelling, separate questionnaires were to be filled out for both, and a household randomly selected from among the households not yet interviewed on the list for that population point was taken off the list. This replacement of households, opposed to adding households, was adopted because the schedule did not allow time for more than 12 interviews per workload.

Baku

In February of 1995, SORGU was commissioned to do a random sampling survey in Baku. At that time a list was compiled of 2000 households in Baku. The 2000 households were distributed across the 11 raions of Baku according to each raion’s proportion of the total population. In each raion, the passport office lists were consulted to select the required number of addresses. In each office, the depth of each drawer full of cards was measured, the total length was divided by the number of households to be selected from that raion and cards were then pulled out at those intervals. From each card a specific address in Baku was noted. There is one passport for each dwelling in that raion regardless of the number of separate household/family units occupied the dwelling. The passport lists are, in principle, continuously updated with information from the housing maintenance offices. However, dwellings that are used for business, unoccupied, abandoned or rented to foreigners may remain listed. Furthermore, it is not clear how new privately built housing units would be listed.The 408 households and 92 replacements for this survey were selected by choosing a random number between 1 and 4, starting with that number and then selecting every fifth address from the existing list.

Internally Displaced Population

The National Statistical Committee prepared a listing of population and number of households of internally displaced persons by raion in July 1995. From that list, 34 workloads of 12 households each were selected from 26 raions and 11 Baku Administrative Regions using with a sampling interval and a random start similar to the method used outside of Baku. Ten workloads were selected in Baku and 24 were selected in 17 raions. As before, some raions received more than one workload. In each raion, the administrative offices for the Ministry of Refugees was consulted to locate the internally displaced persons. Each office should have a list of internally displaced persons by households. An additional level of sampling took place to choose three places and four interviews will be conducted in each place. These places were buildings, towns, or tent camps depending on how the households were listed.

Sampling as Implemented

In the course of the field work, it was discovered that population lists are not maintained in major urban areas. In Kuba, Xachmas, Devichi, Qaxi, Sheki, Ali Bairamli, Gojai and Agdash, supervisors had to improvise. In some cases passport registration lists were used, as was done in Baku. In other cases electric users lists, gas office books and butter/meat coupon distribution lists were used in order to capture a sample that was as representative as possible. During field work, one population point, Xandar, was not accessible due to security concerns and its proximity to the occupied region. A second population point, Sofukent, was not accessible because of the weather. In both cases, it was not practicable to replace the population points with two other population points randomly selected from the national list. Instead, field teams were instructed to visit the nearest population point of approximately the same size to the chosen population point. The only major disruption to fieldwork occurred in Naxicevan where interviewers were shot at by terrorists, fortunately none was hurt.