Tracking Respondents 10 Years Later: Rationale and Preliminary Results

KHDS-2 collects longitudinal data by revisiting respondents interviewed 10-13 years ago. It will be one of the few household surveys that has data over such a long period and that can address questions concerning long-term effects of orphanhood, disability, lack of education, mortality, morbidity, etc.... KHDS intends to study development processes at household or individual level with a longer time frame. It is a unique opportunity to assess who stayed in poverty over this period and why; who moved out of poverty and how.

The novel aspect of the tracking is that it aimed at revisiting all households currently containing at least one individual who had been interviewed in 1991/94. This means that many split-off households were traced in nearby villages, in other parts of Tanzania and even in other countries (most notably Uganda). This costly exercise is important because migration and dissolution of households are often hypothesised to be important responses to hardship. If this is true, then a survey that fails to include these observations is likely to underestimate the effect of adult mortality on the survivors (or the effect of any other hardship that triggers these reactions). At the same time it will provide a unique opportunity to study these coping mechanisms: who uses them, what is the effect, do they get people out of poverty or do they constitute a poverty trap themselves.

In October/November 2003 a team of 8 people visited all 51 survey sites of the original KHDS on a tracking trip. The purpose was to find out as much information as possible on the whereabouts of the original respondents. It soon became apparent that villages are high information environments and relatively little effort was needed to find out where all the previous respondents had moved to. After this exercise, which lasted for about two months, 877 out of the original 919 households had either been contacted or sufficient information was collected to trace them to where ever they currently resided. It was found that many of the original household members had gone on to form their own households. Typically individuals noted as dependent children ten years ago now live independently; others got divorced, orphaned or went to live with extended family. At the end of the exercise the research team found that the original 877 households had multiplied into a new total of 3051 households. As shown by the figure below, only 45% of these households were found in the original villages, 30% had moved within the region, 14% to another region in Tanzania and 2% had moved to another country. Within other regions of Tanzania most households were found living in Mwanza, followed by Dar-es-Salaam, Shinyanga and Mara. Those who had moved to other countries were mostly found living in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya, but some were reported to be living as far away as Norway, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom. It was found that about 14% of the total population had died.

Note to the figure above: "Traced" means that there was adequate address information for at least one surviving household member during the initial field visits in October - November 2004. Subsequent field work from January - May 2004 yielded additional information, which increased the number of traced households, and this is not reflected in the statistics presented here.