We are currently developing an important new resource which will draw together questionnaires from countries (and dependent territories) around the world that have conducted surveys using questions based on the consensual approach to measuring multi-dimensional poverty. It is a multi-lingual resource which will enable you to view questions in the language in which it was asked.

Searching for questions

Under Survey search, you will be able to search all the questions that have been asked in these surveys. You can do this by using the tabs or you can do a textual search by using the search box at the top of the page – or a combination of both.

Searching by tab

In the top block of tabs, you can search by the target of the question, that is whether the question is aimed at asking about an item for an ‘Adult’, ‘Child’, ‘Household’ or ‘Neighbourhood’. Some questions will be aimed at more than one category.
In the second block of tabs, you can specify the main category you are interested in. These go from ‘Food’ and ‘Clothing’ on the first line through to ‘Quality of area’ on the last line. Again, some questions will be in more than one main category. You will see this when you click on one of these tabs, as the other main categories in which the question is tabbed are listed with the main category you have clicked highlighted in purple. 
You will also see, a list of sub-categories, so you can specify your search more closely. For example, for the main category of ‘Food’, you will see a block of sub-categories which starts with ‘Enough food’ and ‘Enough protein’ and ends with ‘Shops’.  Again, some questions are in more than one sub-category which you will see when you click on one of these tabs, as the other sub-categories in which the question is tabbed are listed with the sub-category you have clicked highlighted in purple. 

Searching by text

The text box searches both the text of the master question, and also of any corresponding actual questions in any language. This is particularly useful if you want to do a search in a language other than English. So for example, if you search for maaltye (meals in Africaans), you will find the ‘Three meals a day’ question as the actual question in the South African Africaans survey used that word. You can add a text search at any stage in a search by tabs to narrow down the search further. If you have selected tags, the text search will only search within the tags selected.

Viewing the actual questions

At each stage of your search, you will see all the master questions we have entered into the database listed below. Currently, we have uploaded only some of the surveys used for this database and the questions used in these surveys are highlighted in purple.  When you click on one these questions, you will be taken to a new page with a list of all the surveys (currently uploaded) in which this question appears. This page, ‘Survey actual questions’, gives the question in the language in which it was asked. From here, you can go to a pdf of the actual survey questionnaire in the language or languages in which the survey was conducted by following the links provided. You will see a ‘necessities link’ (which will take you to the place in the survey where it is asked whether the item is a necessity or not) and a ‘possession link‘ (which will take you to the place in the survey where it is asked whether the respondent has the item or not).

Exploring the surveys

Under Show surveys, you will see all the surveys currently uploaded into the database. It provides key information about the survey, including the year, country and continent it was conducted, and the language or languages in which it was conducted. You will also see a column for the World Bank Income Classification of the country; this applies to its classification at the time of the survey. You can sort the order in which the surveys appear by clicking on the header for each of the columns.  The default is sorted by year.  Clicking on a country, will take you to a page which provides further details of the surveys including pdfs of all the questionnaires conducted in all the languages in which they have been conducted. Clicking on a continent will take you to al list of the other countries in that continent for which we have uploaded the questionnaire.

We will be uploading the remaining surveys which form the questions in the database in the near future.