Sponsor
Funding: This study was funded by Friends of a Healthy Uganda and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01MH113494. The funders had no role in study design; data collection, analysis, or interpretation; preparation of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.
Published In
Journal of Global Health
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-1-2020
Subjects
Real-time monitoring, Household surveys
Abstract
Background: In resource-limited settings, the Filmer & Pritchett asset index is frequently used to measure household economic status. Little is known about how its validity is affected by differential reporting or recall within households.
Methods: As part of a whole-population survey in a rural region of southwestern Uganda, we elicited household asset information from married dyads (404 men and 404 matched women) residing within the same households. We assessed the extent to which the asset index yielded differing measures of relative household wealth, depending on whether the husband’s or wife’s survey data were used in its calculation. To estimate agreement, we used Cohen’s κ for binary and categorical variables, and Cronbach’s α for continuous variables. We also assessed the extent to which asset wealth quintiles assigned based on husbands’ vs wives’ reporting were concordant, and whether discordance was related to demographic characteristics.
Results: For most individual assets, agreement ranged from moderate to very good. Asset index scores based on husbands’ vs wives’ reporting were positively correlated (Pearson r = 0.85). Corresponding wealth quintiles were moderately concordant (weighted κ = 0.65); 171 households (43%) differed by one or more quintiles when the husbands’ vs wives’ reporting was used, and 43 (11%) differed by two or more quintiles. Concordance in asset wealth quintile could not be explained by joint educational attainment, age, or age difference.
Conclusions: There is significant intra-household variability in household asset reporting that can materially affect how households are classified on a widely used measure of relative household asset wealth.
Rights
Copyright (c) 2021 The Authors
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.7189/jogh.10.010412
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/35344
Citation Details
Smith, M. L., Kakuhikire, B., Baguma, C., Rasmussen, J. D., Bangsberg, D. R., & Tsai, A. C. (2020). Do household asset wealth measurements depend on who is surveyed? Asset reporting concordance within multi-adult households in rural Uganda. Journal of global health, 10(1).