Field operations Afghanistan - National Risk and Vulnerability Survey 2011-2012, Living Conditions Survey NRVA 2011 12 report

7 SURVEY METHODOLOGY AND OPERATIONS

2.10 Data limitations

The speciic constraints in the Afghanistan context in terms of security problems, cultural barriers and local survey capacity induced some data limitations. The following observations should be taken into account when interpreting the results in this report: • In 150 out of 2,100 cases 7.1 percent, originally sampled clusters could not be visited, in most cases due to security reasons. For 133 of these cases 6.3 percent of the total, clusters were replaced. As the non-visited areas may have proiles different from visited areas, the inal sample will have a slight bias in the results. This effect will have been larger at the provincial level for provinces with relatively large numbers of replacement. • In 18 percent of the cases, sampled areas were temporarily inaccessible due to insecurity 13 percent or physical access problems 5 percent, concentrated in winter time. Upon improvement of local conditions these areas were covered in a later round of data collection. • Out of the 21,000 household interviews scheduled, 20,828 99.2 percent were actually implemented. This data reduction is limited and has not signiicantly affected the reliability of data. • Analysis of the population structure by sex and age shows under-enumeration of women and girls, and young children, especially infants. Coverage of the youngest age group was much better than in 2007-08, but signiicant numbers are still omitted. Cultural backgrounds related to the seclusion of women and high infant mortality are among likely reasons for these omissions. • Although an improvement compared to NRVA 2007-08 can be noted, the quality of age reporting in the Afghan population remains very poor, as indicated by large age heaping on ages with digits ending on 5 and 0. 8 • Due to security problems, work by female interviewers in Zabul was very restricted. Consequently, the information on maternal and child health, and fertility and mortality information is largely missing for this province. However, the food consumption module in the female questionnaire was collected by male interviewers interviewing male respondents.

2.11 Reporting

The source of all information presented in this report is the NRVA 2011-12, unless otherwise speciied. Presenting information from other sources than NRVA does not imply an endorsement by CSO, but should merely be interpreted as a contextualisation of the present indings. Titles of tables presented in this report follow a standard convention to exactly deine the table contents and structure: irst, the title states the universe of elements presented in the table, then it deines the variables presented in the column headings, then the variables presented in the row headings. In the title the universe and the column variables are separated by a comma ‘,’; the column variables and the row variables are separated by ‘, and by’. 8 The Myers Blended Index is 20.6 and the Whipples Index is 223.