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RANQ toolbox Attributed
to: Jackeline Velazco
For enquiries contact Jane French j.french@bath.ac.uk
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The theory
of human need conceives of wellbeing as full participation
in a social form of life that depends not only on physical
health but also healthy relationships. It a) derives a universal
set
of basic and intermediate needs and b) distinguishes these
from culturally specific ‘needs-satisfiers’.
RANQ provides information on both of these categories.
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The resource profile approach,
developed in parallel to the livelihoods framework, uses
the concept of
resources rather than ‘capitals’. In particular it
seeks detailed information on the social and cultural resources
that influence wellbeing outcomes. RANQ provides information on
households’ control over a wide range of resources.
More specifically, RANQ gathers information on household
resources (human, material, natural, social and cultural), the
extent of needs satisfaction for households (health, education,
food and housing) and long-term shocks and fortunes.
3. How RANQ contributes to WeD research
RANQ serves the following three purposes for the
WeD research:
1. The collection of baseline data including access
to resources and need satisfactions amongst the households and
individuals in the research communities; this subsequently enables
purposive sub-samples of individuals and households for ‘post-RANQ’
fieldwork.
2. The generation of data that can be used for comparative analysis
- statistically and qualitatively – both within countries
and across the four countries.
3. Developing an instrument specifically designed for the study
of wellbeing.
4. Description
The RANQ
questionnaire is identical across research sites and countries.
However, the RANQ
codebook identifies a wide range of locally different answers.
The common format and procedures permits analysis within site,
across sites in the same country (rural and urban) and across
the four countries.
RANQ is organised into six sections:
1. the organisation of the household
2. a brief general assessment of subjective well-being
3. human resources: household member’s occupations, education
and health.
4. access and use of material resources such as land and natural
resources, livestock, asset ownership, housing utilities and sanitation.
This section also gathers data on long-term shocks and fortunes,
food shortages and clothing, wealth, transfers and income support.
(Both the third and fourth sections also include questions on
household’s perceptions, expectations and satisfaction on
various resource dimensions)
5. social resources such as kin and fictive connections, connections
to the local community, to the wider world, to markets and government
6. cultural resources such as language, social identity and honorific
titles
5. How RANQ was developed
Before RANQ was administered, it underwent an intensive
grounding and piloting phase within each of the four countries.
This involved the identification of the empirical data required
to address the conceptual issues; preparation of the survey instrument
for the collection of empirical data; selection of the communities
and households from which the data was to be gathered, and the
planning of a data management system.
Translation of the RANQ into the different languages
that took account of the different dialects within the four countries
proved a challenging task. Special care was taken to ensure ongoing
iteration between the country teams and pilot community respondents
to establish the correct local terms for various items to be used
within the questionnaire and to ensure that questions were phrased
in a meaningful way that were both context specific and relevant.
These were subsequently incorporated into a finalised translated
RANQ appropriate to each of the research sites.
In each country, the selection of communities was
consistent with an analytically reasoned case for why such a selection
of communities provides insights into relationship between poverty,
inequality and the quality of life in that country. Details on
the rational for site selection within the four countries are
summarised in Box 1.
Box 1: Site Selection
(link to country
websites)
Bangladesh
Bangladesh is a highly dynamic country that has experienced
profound demographic, economic, social, political and cultural
changes over the years. One of the most visible changes
is the gradual urbanisation of the country with a real increase
of urban populations as well as the gradual coverage of
new areas by urban growth. The expansion of the country’s
capital (Dhaka) epitomises this process. One consequence
of this is a much more obvious sense of connectedness and
integration in the country. The WeD Research in Bangladesh
argues that the process of connectedness and integration
generates complex patterns of benefits and disadvantages.
The six research
sites are located in two districts distinguished by
their distance from Dhaka. The first district (Manikganj)
is close to and enjoys very good communication with Dhaka
while the second (Dinajpur) is quite distant from the capital
and the communication is much more restricted. In each of
the two districts, we chose one urban site (within the main
town district) and two rural sites. One rural site was chosen
close to the main district town and the other far from it
in a remote site.
Ethiopia
Within the Ethiopian context, the WeD team is seeking
to analyse the production, reproduction and reduction of
poverty within inequality dynamics and in relation to the
cultural constructions of subjective wellbeing. This is
being achieved through three separate, but
linked programmes. At the core is an in-depth study
of six
sites, four rural and two urban. The rural sites are
in the two largest regions (Amhara and Oromia), and in each
case one site is close to market and state influences and
the other more remote and less integrated. One of the urban
sites is a key town for step-migration from one of the selected
rural sites to the capital city. The other site is located
in a market area on the outskirts of the capital city Addis
Ababa in which a range of manifestations of poverty and
destitution are apparent.
Given the considerable diversity in terms
of ecology, livelihoods, cultures and societies, and in
order to locate the selected sites meaningfully within the
broader Ethiopian context, the country-wide analysis is
based on grounding research in 20 sites conducted in the
summer of 2003. This wider coverage enables the WeD project
to situate the sites selected for in-depth study through
both longitudinal panel data as well as comparative spatial
analysis covering much of the country's diversity.
Peru
The distribution of income and wealth in Peru is one of
the most unequal in the world. A key objective in the Peru
WeD research is to investigate how this inequality is perpetuated
and explore its impact on different measures of wellbeing
along the “corridor” that runs east from Lima
into the Central Highlands of the country. The concept of
the "corridor" is not solely geographical (coastline/desert,
highlands and jungle), but reflects variation in:
-Environment, including altitude and access
to natural resources
-Population density and degree of urbanisation
-The relative importance of local and global trade
-Proximity to centres and sub-centres of political power
-Ethnicity (including the relative importance of Quechua
and Spanish)
-The relative importance of individual and collective values
This variation is captured in the selection
of seven sites along the corridor including two
urban, two peri-urban and two rural sites.
An additional rural site located in the jungle was added
at a later stage to capture more diversity along the corridor.
In doing this, diversity between urban, peri-urban and rural
sites is fully captured taking as reference Lima, the capital
city, and its influence on wellbeing across the Andean and
Amazon regions.
Thailand
The WeD research in Thailand
addresses the rapid transformation of Thai society, which
the country has been experiencing over the last three decades
and considers its overall impact on wellbeing. Although
Thailand has the highest per capita income in comparison
to the other three WeD research countries, its strong economic
growth and high incomes have been accompanied by a remarkable
persistence in inequality.
The WeD study focuses in two distinctive regions of the
country. The Northeast is often acknowledged as the poorest,
while the South is a relatively prosperous area. Within
each region, however, there is diversity and the WeD research
is designed to explore this and capture the distinctiveness
of the ways in which people construct their wellbeing.
Three rural sites
have been selected in both the Northeast and the South
to capture the impact of proximity and connectedness
to urban
centres, degree of infrastructure development, ethnic composition
and dependence on agriculture and natural resources.
Most
studies in Thailand exploring problems related with urbanization
have primarily concentrated on Bangkok, but there has
been
significant urban growth in the provinces. As a result,
two rapidly growing provincial centres (Khon Kaen in
the
Northeast and Hat Yai in the South) have been selected
as a focus for the urban studies. |
In the study, we ruled out the possibility of drawing
a nationally representative sample of communities for the following
reasons:
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Difficulty of gaining a nationally
representative picture with a relatively small sample.
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Availability of data from previous
surveys increases the advantage of going back to the same samples.
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Conditions important for the
study of poverty, inequality and quality of life are significantly
different in the four countries. Thus using the same criteria
to dictate samples for all countries may be difficult and
even
counter productive.
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The research experiences and interests
of WeD members, both in Bath and the project countries, differ
- an identical sampling procedure may not give sufficient flexibility
to accommodate the strength of this diversity.
6. How RANQ was implemented
RANQ was administered to approximately 250 households
in each research site in the local language by a team of interviewers
selected by each of the country teams. Before RANQ was carried
out, interviewers underwent intensive training using guidelines
in how to carry out the RANQ and input details on the household
using the roster
card and the responses to questionnaire
using the correct codes from the codebook.
(The guidelines, roster cards, questionnaire and roster cards
are all restricted access files. For more details please conatact
Jane French j.french@bath.ac.uk)
RANQ is designed as a single respondent instrument.
Where possible the single principal respondent to the questions
was the Head of Household. In the absence of the Head of Household
another senior member of the household was taken as the principal
respondent. In order to obtain information or views from other
members of the household, interviewers were encouraged to allow
the main respondent to be informed by other members of the household.
This type of ‘group’ interview is often unavoidable
but RANQ procedures encouraged the principal respondent to consult
other available household members, if it was acceptable to do
so.
The same coding system and data verification procedures
were used to ensure that comparable data was collected across
all sites of the same country and across the all countries to
facilitate analysis. Upon completion, the responses were inputted
into English by the each of the country teams into a specially
designed RANQ Microsoft Access database. This was followed by
a series of consistency checks to avoid error.
7. How can RANQ be analysed
The RANQ data permits analysis a) within a site,
b) across sites of the same country, eg. by rural and urban areas,
and c) across the four countries. The following are examples of
the research questions it could address:
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To what extent are basic needs
satisfied and how does this vary across groups? For example,
is there any significant difference in access to health services,
household member’s health status and education levels
across the sites and groups (classified by age and sex)?
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What are the major need satisfiers
in different communities?
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What access do households have
to different resources, including social and cultural resources?
For instance, do the poorest households have the lowest endowment
of material resources such as land, livestock, housing, transfers,
income support, and others?
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To what extent are need satisfactions
based on markets, government services, other providers, and
relational resources? For example, how are need satisfactions
affected by household participation in: a) labour market (as
self-employed or wage worker), b) product market (buyer and
seller), c) credit market, and d) input markets? Do the more
market-integrated households have the highest level of need
satisfaction?
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What long-term shocks and fortunes
affect different households?
- How do different communities differ in all the above?
8. Links to other research tools
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