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Difficulties in urban wealth breakdowns
Q: In an urban area people don’t know one another so well, so isn’t it difficult to find good key informants to do the wealth breakdown?
A: It is true that people in urban areas can easily live separate lives and live less as a community, but this tends to more the case among the better-off than the poor. Poor urban households often live in very crowded conditions and have as much interaction with their neighbors as in a village – gifts and borrowing may be very common, for example. In practice, therefore, the differences between a poor urban area and a rural area are not that great and, with care, groups of key informants can be found that are capable of preparing a good wealth breakdown, and can readily identify potential participants for the household representative interviews. And since the household representative interviews take less time in an urban area, there is usually time to tack on a quick wealth breakdown at the end of each interview so to get more data for the wealth breakdown analysis.
