needs and resources in the investigation of well‐being in developing countries: illustrative...
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This article was downloaded by: [York University Libraries]On: 14 November 2014, At: 16:36Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
Journal of EconomicMethodologyPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjec20
Needs and resources in theinvestigation of well‐being indeveloping countries: illustrativeevidence from Bangladesh andPeruJ. Allister McGregor a , Andrew McKay b & JackelineVelazco ca University of Bath E-mail:b University of Sussex and University of Bathc University of Girona (Spain) , Catholic University ofPeru and University of BathPublished online: 09 Mar 2007.
To cite this article: J. Allister McGregor , Andrew McKay & Jackeline Velazco (2007)Needs and resources in the investigation of well‐being in developing countries:illustrative evidence from Bangladesh and Peru, Journal of Economic Methodology, 14:1,107-131, DOI: 10.1080/13501780601170115
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501780601170115
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Needs and resources in the investigation ofwell-being in developing countries:illustrative evidence from Bangladesh andPeru
J. Allister McGregor, Andrew McKay and JackelineVelazco
Abstract The paper offers an analysis of how to operationalize the developmentgoal of promoting well-being, and provides an exemplar. It focuses on oneelement of a comprehensive methodology to operationalize empirical researchinto the social and cultural construction of well-being in developing countries.This research uses a definition of well-being that combines objective andsubjective dimensions and locates these in the social and cultural relationships ofparticular societies. We focus here on the Resources and Needs Questionnaire(RANQ), a research instrument specifically developed for this work. Thisexplores the relationships between the resources that households command andthe levels of needs satisfaction which household members experience. Preliminaryanalysis of data for Bangladesh and Peru identifies a number of significantrelationships between the distribution of resources that households command andthe levels of needs satisfaction they achieve. These outcome results then representa foundation for further analysis using complementary qualitative and process-oriented data.
Keywords: well-being, poverty, resources, needs, Peru, Bangladesh
JEL Classifications: A12, I32, Z1
1 INTRODUCTION
Over time the mainstream international development literature has
broadened its view of what development must be considered to entail.
The attention of major development policy organizations has shifted from a
narrow focus on economic growth to human development and then on to
encompass wider notions such as good governance, participation and
freedom. Some of this has found expression in successive Human
Development Reports, as published by the United Nations Development
Programme from 1990 onwards.
Elsewhere in the academic arena, and in economics in particular, there
has been a resurgence of interest in the concept of happiness (see Oswald
1997; Frey and Stutzer 2000; Veenhoven 2002; Collard 2003; Layard 2005),
with some arguing that measurements of happiness may represent better
Journal of Economic Methodology ISSN 1350-178X print/ISSN 1469-9427 online
# 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/13501780601170115
Journal of Economic Methodology 14:1, 107–131 March 2007
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indicators of the well-being of a nation (and thus be a better guide for
policymakers) than national income. This literature particularly brings
together ideas from economics and psychology and has been spearheaded bythe work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman has played
an important role in the recent emergence of the influential positive
psychology movement (see Kahneman et al. 1999) and the concepts and
methods used in this field of study are attracting wide attention, including in
a number of different and innovative applications in studies of developing
countries (see Biswas-Diener and Diener 2001; Graham and Pettinato 2002;
and Rojas 2005).
This interest in happiness or subjective well-being, however, appears tostand in stark contrast to the recent public and policy enthusiasm for
the objectives of the Millennium Development Declaration. This global
policy initiative focuses on a major cause of global unhappiness and ill-
being, namely the persistence of dire poverty, particularly, although not
exclusively, in the developing countries of the global South. The Millennium
Development Goals include ‘halving extreme poverty’, ‘halting the spread of
HIV/AIDS and ‘providing universal primary education’ by 2015. They are
so ‘basic’ as to make the debates over happiness and subjective well-being inthe developed North appear frivolous. We argue here, however, that the two
sets of initiatives are not inimical and indeed that both our academic
understanding and policy thinking can be improved by bringing debates over
poverty into relation with the concerns raised by the broad subjective well-
being literature. This is emphatically not to suggest that we need to think of
people in developing countries as ‘poor but happy’, but rather that a notion of
subjective well-being, that incorporates but involves more than happiness, is an
important dimension of all people’s lives, whether wealthy or poor.We argue here for a distinctive definition of well-being. Well-being must
be conceived of as combining objective and subjective dimensions and these
are located in the social and cultural relationships that all human beings in
all societies are engaged in. This conception provides us with a rounded
insight into what people do, what they aspire to and how their actions and
aspirations are constrained or enabled by wider societal structures.
However, if this is to be more than a set of philosophical propositions
and is to engage those that formulate policy for poverty reduction, then it isnecessary to provide evidence of the practicality and worth of this approach.
The empirical investigation of this conception of well-being is challenging
but we argue has the potential to contribute further to our understanding of
why some people are better able to achieve well-being while others are
condemned to live their lives in poverty.
The paper introduces the methodology for researching well-being as
developed by the research group on Wellbeing in Developing Countries
(WeD) at the University of Bath. The WeD group consists of amultidisciplinary and multi-country team of researchers carrying out a
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programme of primary research in four developing countries: Bangladesh,
Ethiopia, Peru and Thailand.1 The paper concentrates on one key element
of this conception of well-being: the relationship between the resources that
households in developing countries command and the levels of needs
satisfaction that household members experience. It explains the develop-
ment of the Resources and Needs Questionnaire (RANQ) and discusses its
place in the WeD methodology. The paper concludes with a brief and
illustrative analysis of the relationships between resource distributions and
needs satisfaction levels in Bangladesh and Peru.
2 POVERTIES AND WELL-BEING
This conception of well-being does not deny the need to address the most
obvious and debilitating manifestations of poverty such as the lack of food,
shelter or sanitation, but takes account of debates over poverty and public
action which call for the incorporation of a wider range of dimensions.
There is much current acceptance of the need to regard poverty as multi-
dimensional, although what dimensions are to be included and how they are
to be properly measured remain open to debate (Ruggeri-Laderchi et al.
2003; Bourguignon and Chakravarty 2003). In international development
circles these multi-dimensional poverty debates partially and occasionally
intersect with a wider and more diffuse literature, spanning moral
philosophy, social policy and development studies, which is concerned with
the social and cultural dimensions of poverty and impoverishment. These
discussions broaden the poverty agenda by encouraging a debate over what
it is to be a healthy, socially functioning human being and what a ‘good
society’ might look like (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2000; Doyal and Gough 1991;
Gasper 2004; Max-Neef 1991; Douglas and Ney 1998; Rao and Walton
2004; Deneulin 2006).
The notion of well-being advocated here rests heavily upon these. It also
recognises that while concepts of poverty largely focus on what people lack,
there has been a long-running counter-view in the study of development that
has sought to emphasize more positively what poor people can do and what
they aspire to do and to be (Swift 1989; Long and Long 1992; McGregor
1994; Beck 1994; Moser 1998; Lawson et al. 2000; Appadurai 2004). In
other words, it is important to recognize that poor men, women and
children in developing countries are not defined solely by their poverty.
Even in the context of their often substantial lacks, they have positive
aspirations and also (usually) some degree of agency with which to pursue
their own visions of well-being, albeit that in many contexts these may be
highly constrained. By drawing on these diverse debates, the concept of well-
being can be perceived as providing a broader, overarching conceptual
framework against which the many different, partial and often disparate
notions of poverty can be considered (see Gough and McGregor 2007).
Investigation of well-being in developing countries 109
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The significance of the idea of well-being in relation to development has
already been substantially championed. Amartya Sen is foremost in this,
and Partha Dasgupta has also advanced a major treatise on well-being anddevelopment. In Sen’s summative work Development as Freedom, he further
develops his argument that well-being cannot be understood in terms of
particular commodities or even welfare outcomes, but rather must be
thought of in respect of the freedoms that people experience to choose the
life that they have reason to value (1999: 74). The two key dimensions in this
approach are the valued functionings that people are able to achieve and
their capability in being able to choose and achieve these. Dasgupta (1990,
1993) similarly emphasizes the role of freedoms and argues for a measure ofwell-being that combines measures of welfare outcomes with indices of
positive and negative freedoms. Using existing secondary data he provides a
ranking for developing countries and explores the relationships between the
dimensions of his well-being concept, economic growth and per capita
income (Dasgupta 1990).
In establishing his concept of well-being Dasgupta suggests that two
different ways of thinking about the person have dominated the social
sciences: one that emphasizes doing and another that emphasizes being.Where the former leads to debates over freedom and rights and is focused
on processes, the latter attends to welfare and happiness and is more
concerned with outcomes (Dasgupta 1990: 1). The two approaches are often
not distinguished from each other and while for some purposes this
conflation may not be problematic; it is also likely that this may ‘lead to
ethical errors in the choice of policy’ (Dasgupta 1990: 2). Misleading
conclusions over processes can be drawn from the analysis of data that is
primarily concerned with outcomes. As Ray (2006) notes in a recent reviewof dialogues between economics and anthropology, the ways in which the
methodologies of the two disciplines focus differently and respectively on
outcomes and processes, and then fail to recognize and accommodate the
interconnectedness of the two, has been and continues to be a problem when
it comes to providing policy with workable understandings of development
and poverty.
Researching well-being as a combination of objective, subjective and
relational dimensions requires recognition of the inseparability of well-beingoutcomes and processes (McGregor 2007). From the perspective of the
policy challenges highlighted by the Millennium Goals, it is necessary to
understand not only who is poor but how people come to be ‘poor’ and have
often remained so. Policy interventions must seek to change the processes
that reproduce poverty if sustained and sustainable changes in the patterns
of well-being and ill-being outcomes are to be achieved.
The desire to keep both outcome and process in focus can be
accommodated by recognizing that well-being arises from what a personhas, what they can do and how they think and feel about what they both
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have and can do. This is consistent with and is a form of reworking of Sen’s
propositions on functionings and capability. However, the final dimension
of ‘thinking and feeling’ introduces the role of the meanings with which welive in society, and this has particular significance. The dimension of
meaning makes this conception of well-being social rather than purely
individualistic, since it is socially shaped meaning, communicated through
relationships in society, that turns the ‘having’ and ‘doing’ in which people
engage into ‘being’. This draws our attention to the ways in which the
thoughts and actions of people engage societal structures. It is important for
our understanding of poverty and impoverishment to recognize that
different people are located differently in society. They are differentiated,for example, by gender, age, class, ethnic origin, religion and in many other
ways and as such their experiences of societal structures differ. In these,
some are enabled in what they can have, do and think, while others are
constrained in one or more of these three dimensions.
However, these notions of ‘having’, ‘doing’ and ‘thinking’ are still too
abstract for an empirical methodology and need to be translated into a more
workable research agenda. To do this we focus on the relationships between
the resources that individuals and households command in their pursuit oftheir vision of well-being; the needs and goals that they are able to satisfy;
and the quality of life that they are able to attain. In each respect the
methodology must address both the outcomes that people achieve and the
processes that they engage in, as they pursue their notions of well-being.
3 A WELL-BEING METHODOLOGY
The development of this well-being conceptual framework and methodologyis founded in three initial theoretical points of departure: the Resource
Profiles Approach to the construction of livelihoods as developed by
members of the Centre for Development Studies at the University of Bath
(McGregor 1991; Lewis and McGregor 1992); the ‘Theory of Human Need’
as proposed by Doyal and Gough (1991); and a more diverse range of
literature on quality of life and subjective well-being (Camfield and
McGregor 2005). These are discussed extensively elsewhere (Gough et al.
2007). This paper deals primarily with the relationship between resourcesand needs, as a foundation for the subsequent exploration of processes and
meanings.
The resource profiles approach (RPA) provides us with a distinctive
framework for thinking of resources which extends our conception of them
beyond the usual material and human dimensions, to include social, cultural
and also natural resources. It conceives of individuals and households
engaged in the pursuit of both their livelihood and well-being goals through
the deployment of a wide range of resources that they are able to command(McGregor 1994; Lawson et al. 2000).
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A key proposition that arises from early applications of the RPA is that
where households are ‘poor’ in conventional material and human resources
they become all the more dependent on the other categories of resources(McGregor 1994: 269). This dependence then has implications for the terms
on which they are able to engage in social and economic processes, which in
turn can often provide important contributions to understanding why they
remain poor. Following Basu’s (2000) argument that it is appropriate for
empirical insights from other disciplines to contribute to the specification of
formal models for quantitative analysis and then provide complementary
insights for the interpretation of their results, this proposition from RPA
provides the underpinning rationale for the design of the researchinstrument and the preliminary analysis of its data that will be described
later in this paper.
Doyal and Gough’s A Theory of Human Need (1991) argues for the
identification of universal basic human needs and provides philosophical
justification for these, as well as an explanation of how these might be
realized (or not) in different societies. They argue that there are two basic
human needs of health and autonomy. These are high order concepts which
are not achieved directly, but through the satisfaction of a set of elevenintermediate needs which they identify. While the high order argument is
‘universal’, the notion of intermediate needs satisfiers recognizes that these
take specific forms in different societal contexts.
Combining these two bodies of thinking we recognize that resources and
needs are often the flipside of each other. As is noted later, this recognition
has awkward implications for the statistical analysis of the relationships
between them. However, it is the case that the satisfaction of a need can
constitute the resources with which an individual or household pursues theirnext round of desired ends. For example, satisfying the need for food one
day ensures that the human resource (the labourer’s body) is better able to
work the next to satisfy future needs. Equally, resources are not always just
means to some other end, but simultaneously have intrinsic as well as
instrumental value. As Adam Smith recognized it is not just that the shirt is
needed to keep one warm, but that the quality of the shirt may affect a
person’s perception of their ability to participate in society. The meanings
that people apply both to what they perceive as resources and what theyperceive they can do with them are central to our understanding of the
dynamics of well-being (White and Ellison 2007).
The WeD methodology is described in greater detail elsewhere (Gough
and McGregor 2007), but in summary comprises six distinct research
components, each of which generates data on key elements of the well-being
conceptual framework.2 It is a methodology which, as Kanbur (2003)
advocates constructively combines quantitative and qualitative approaches
and which incorporates contributions from a range of different socialscience disciplines. These can be thought of as generating three main types
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of data: data on well-being outcomes (understood as a combination of needs
met, resources over which command is gained, and quality of life achieved);
data which explore the processes whereby these outcomes have arisen; anddata which seek to provide insight into the structures which mediate these
processes. Taken together the six elements of the well-being methodology
provide a coherent set of both quantitative and qualitative data across a
range of different households and individuals in the communities studied.
This paper will now focus its attention on one particular element of the
methodology: the statistical analysis of data generated by the Resources and
Needs Questionnaire (RANQ) developed as a key research tool of the WeD
project. After a brief description of the development of the RANQ we willdescribe the procedures adopted for a preliminary analysis of the cases of
Bangladesh and Peru, which explores the statistical significance of the
relationships between particular patterns of resource command and the
levels of needs satisfaction that households are able to achieve. As we have
indicated, other data, generated by other elements of the well-being
methodology, are then required to interpret the statistical relationships
identified and to provide insights into the social, economic, political and
cognitive processes that might explain these findings.
4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RESOURCES AND NEEDS
QUESTIONNAIRE (RANQ)
The RANQ is a specifically designed household survey that establishes basic
demographic information on the households and communities included in
the WeD study and provides a baseline for the resource distributions and
levels of needs satisfaction achieved for those households. The householdsurvey approach offers the possibility of collecting data on resources and
need satisfaction in a way which is comparable across households, locations
and countries. Although each of the four countries covered by the WeD
programme has to some extent or other a national programme for
household surveys, the data from these were not regarded as appropriate
for use in this study. There were often doubts about the quality of the data
and, if the information covered the communities included in this study, it
usually only did so for a small sample of households.There were two fundamental reasons for collecting new survey data. The
first was that the available surveys generally provide limited information on
social and cultural resources in the ways that these are conceived in this
framework. This applies to many ‘standard’ household surveys. There have
been recent innovations in the design of national household surveys, such
that some now collect more information on these aspects, but it was
considered important to design a questionnaire that would represent a
significant attempt to innovate and more closely accord with the theoriesfrom which the well-being framework is built. The second reason was that
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nationally representative surveys generally sample relatively few households
within selected communities, whereas in this exploratory research it was
important to collect information on a larger number of households within asmaller number of communities.
The inclusion of the social and cultural dimensions in this questionnaire
does not contradict the view that many of these elements are best explored
at greater length and in greater depth using qualitative methods, but it does
seek to illustrate that it is both possible and worthwhile to incorporate some
indicators of these elements in a questionnaire approach. In doing so it is
intended to enable a statistical analysis, in conjunction with the more
conventional measures of material and human resources, which bothcomplements and can be complemented by subsequent or parallel
qualitative investigation and analysis.
The design of the RANQ was a multidisciplinary process that combined
bottom-up and top-down approaches. It involved extensive iteration
between disciplinarists in the research group and among team members in
all of the countries involved. It was top-down in that it uses the five
categories of resources outlined in the resource profiles approach to
structure the questionnaire, so that after an opening section on basichousehold and demographic information it consists of sections on human,
material, natural, social and cultural resources (in that order).3 The major
categories of (intermediate) need satisfaction, derived from the Doyal and
Gough approach, were then accommodated within this structure, to the
extent that they could meaningfully be addressed in a questionnaire
approach.
A basic set of questions were established for each of the sections and the
proto-questionnaire was taken out for grounding in the types ofcommunities and in the regions to be studied in each country. The
grounding phase tested the relevance of the questions and sought to ensure
that specific or ‘local’ forms of resources and needs were considered. It
identified appropriate language for the terms and also sought to recognize
any additional and country-specific or local forms of needs or resources that
were not foreseen by the top-down approaches. The results of the grounding
process were back-translated into English and were coordinated and
discussed across all countries. A common form of the RANQ was finalized,with additional country-specific questions where these were required. This
was then translated back into the relevant local language for piloting.
The questionnaire was extensively piloted, amended accordingly and then
applied across all four countries. In each country at least four rural and two
urban communities were selected for study and in each of these up to 250
households were included in the RANQ survey. In some cases this is all of
the households in a community and in others it is a large random sample.
This resulted in no fewer than 1,000 households surveyed in each countryand a total of 5,130 households across all four. The development process for
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the RANQ was designed to achieve a sufficient level of cognitive and
linguistic equivalence in all four countries and to produce an instrument that
seeks to be sensitive to ‘local’ realities, while also being amenable for‘universal’ analysis (McGregor 2004).
5 ORGANIZING THE RANQ DATA
The first step in this analysis of the RANQ data is to organize the responses
into a set of workable indicators corresponding to the framework of
resources and needs. The approach to organizing the data on resources seeks
to construct a profile of the resources over which households or individualshave command across the five categories: material, human, social, cultural
and natural. In respect of needs, we noted earlier that the two core basic
needs identified by the theory of human need (health and autonomy) cannot
be directly assessed by the RANQ, but the data can be organized to provide
indicators of satisfaction (or not) of nine of the eleven intermediate needs
identified by Doyal and Gough.
The indicators used for the resources that a household commands are
presented in Table 1. In some cases the measures of resources are fairlystandard and relatively easily defined, as in the case of material resources,
although there are challenges in summarizing a diverse number of indicators
on different assets and different forms of material resources in a convenient
form for use. In this approach natural resources are distinguished from
material resources in terms of their ownership status. Natural resources here
refer to those resources which a household uses or exploits, but which it does
not privately own or contractually lease. In other categories and particularly
for social or cultural resources there is much less standard practice, but theindicators are developed using the underlying theoretical insights and
country level knowledge that informed the construction of the RANQ and
which underpin this approach to well-being.
There are a large number of questions dedicated to social resources in the
RANQ and these consider relationships across a range of institutional
spheres that have been identified in previous work as possibly affecting the
ability of the household to achieve its well-being goals. These spheres
include kin relationships; relationships in the community, with systems ofgovernance and administrative resource allocation, and in the market. For
cultural resources there were a more limited range of questions. The earlier
discussion of meaning and the instrumental and intrinsic valuation of
resources alluded to the fact that all forms of resources can have cultural
dimensions (White and Ellison 2007), but in the RANQ we restricted the
questions on cultural resources to a limited range of indicators which
obviously and fairly directly reflected or affected status. These included
honorific titles, the ability to participate in the dominant language of thesociety, as well as religious identity.
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Table 1 Definition of resources variables
Resources Indicator of access to resources used from RANQ
Social Community connections1. If any household member is member of any organization2. If any household member participates in any form of
collective community activityKin and fictive connections3. If any household member seeks job, receives food and input,
or borrows money using relatives, friends or neighbourconnections
Connections to markets4. If any household member works outside of the household5. If any household member is seeking work outside the
household using as means previous employer, or formal andinformal labour organizer/agency
6. If household buys any proportion of staple food7. If household buys any input to carry out the main productive
activity8. If household sells for cash any proportion of main products9. If any household member has a bank account10. If any household member has ever borrowed money using
private sector, government and non-government sources.Community sources such as friend/neighbour, relative,patron, trader, shopkeeper, funeral society, landlord, andother local organizations are excluded
Connection to government11. If any household member has ever held a recognized
government position12. If any close relative of the household has ever held a
recognized government position13. If any household member has made use of government
services in the last yearConnection to non-government organizations14. If any household member has ever held a recognized position
of responsibility in any other kind of organization15. If any close relative of the household has ever held any
recognized position of responsibility in any other kind oforganization
16. If any household member has made use of non-governmentservices in the last year
Cultural 17. If head of household and spouse speak the ‘dominant’language (Bangla in Bangladesh and Spanish in Peru)
18. If head of household and spouse belong to the ‘dominant’religion (Islam in Bangladesh and Christian-Catholic in Peru)
19. If any household member has a special or honorific title
Material 20. Number of assets owned by the household (hand tools,mechanized productive inputs, other productive assets,transport, electrical consumer goods and other householdassets)
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Many of the indicators of resources are summarized as zero-one dummy
variables. Again it is important to recognize the limitations of capturing
insights into social or cultural resources using a survey approach, but these
indicators nonetheless enable an overall assessment of which households
report themselves as relatively better off in terms of their command of social
and cultural resources.
Ten indicators of intermediate needs satisfaction (relating to nine of
Doyal and Gough’s intermediate needs) can be constructed based on the
RANQ data, as presented in Table 2. It was not possible to construct a
precise one-to-one mapping of indicators to intermediate needs. For two
intermediate needs (adequate nutritional food and water; and adequate
protective housing), two indicators were available, each of which was
judged to be individually important and was therefore included. Further, it
was not easy to construct clearly distinct indicators of physical security and
economic security and so the information available on major shocks
experienced by households was used as a single indictor of both
intermediate needs. The RANQ did not collect information to enable
construction of a meaningful indicator for the safety of the working
environment or for security in childhood. In both cases satisfaction of these
needs (which are much less easily standardized) would be better assessed
through a different research instrument. Nevertheless adequate indicators
could be constructed from RANQ data for nine out of eleven intermediate
needs.
Resources Indicator of access to resources used from RANQ
21. Total amount of land in hectares used by the household22. Livestock and small animals owned by the household have
been standardized using the tropical livestock unit (TLU)a
23. If any household member carried out regular work for cash asmain activity in the last month
24. If the household owns the dwelling
Natural resources 25. If the household does not own natural resources but has openaccess use
Human 26. Index of the number of unskilled equivalent units in thehousehold (UEA) which takes into account the number ofadults members in the household and their level of educationexpressed as years of schooling (De Janvry and Sadoulet1996)
Note: a The conversion factors used are: 1 cattle51 TLU, 1 goat/sheep50.15 TLU,1 pig50.2 TLU, 1 horse51 TLU, 1 mule51.15 TLU, 1 donkey50.65 TLU,1 camel51.45 TLU and 1 poultry50.005 TLU (Ramakrishna and Demeke, 2002).
Table 1 Continued
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What the two tables illustrate is that, as we noted earlier, it is often
difficult in practice to delineate clearly between resources commanded and
needs satisfied, this applying across many of the resource categories. Thus
we explore a household’s connections to kin or fictive kin as a dimension of
both needs satisfaction (significant primary relationships) and their social
resources. The principle adopted here though has been to use specific
variables only as indicators of needs, or as indicators of a given category of
resources (so as to try to avoid spurious results in looking later at the
relationship between resources and needs). In addition, the choice of
indicators to use may be contested. Requiring a household to have access to
Table 2 Definition of indicators of intermediate needs satisfaction
Intermediate need Indicator of needs not met used from RANQ
Adequate nutritional foodand water
1. If household suffered shortage of staple food inlast year
2. If household drinking water obtained frominsecure sources
Adequate protective housing 3. If dwelling has no electricity4. If dwelling has poor quality roofing
A non-hazardous physicalenvironment
5. If household does not have access to adequatetoilet facilities
Appropriate health care 6. If any household member was ill and did notseek treatment; or if any household memberunder 20 years has not been vaccinated againstmeasles (Bangladesh) or polio (Peru)
Significant primaryrelationships
7. If household head or spouse have not spenttime with close relatives outside the householdin last week
Physical security 8. If household faced any major adverse shocks inlast five years which had a major impact onconsumption or assets
Economic security
Safe birth control andchildbearing
9. If household has not been provided withcontraceptives
Basic education 10. If any children aged 6–15 years are not at orhave not attended primary school; or if no adulthousehold member has completed primaryschool
Security in childhood No adequate indicator available
A non-hazardous workenvironment
No adequate indicator available
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piped or bottled water to be considered to have satisfied its needs for
adequate water may be unduly restrictive given that in many contexts water
from other sources such as wells may be perfectly adequate (and in some
contexts bottled water sold by street vendors may not be secure). In the
choices we made here we were guided as best we could be by knowledge of
the countries concerned.
Intermediate need satisfiers fundamentally relate to individuals, but in
practice many indicators are measured at the household level (e.g. drinking
water source), while other needs may not be equally relevant to all
household members (e.g. a safe work environment is not relevant to those
that do work). Reflecting these issues intermediate need satisfaction is
estimated here at the household level. The likelihood of inequality in the
distribution of needs satisfaction within the households studied is acknowl-
edged and we are aware of the importance of understanding intra-household
issues if we are to understand the dynamics of poverty in most countries, but
this is not dealt with at this stage of the analysis or in this paper. At the
household level therefore each indicator of intermediate needs (non)
satisfaction is defined such that it takes the value one if the need is deemed
not to be satisfied, and zero otherwise.
There are still a number of choices to be made in constructing the needs
indicator. In particular, in many cases it may not be possible to define
indicators for all individuals or households. This arises particularly in
relation to basic education and use of health services. Thus if no one in the
household was ill in the reference period used in the survey then it is not
possible to assess whether or not this household has access to health services
based on such an indicator. Likewise if there are no children of the relevant
age range in a household then it is not possible to assess the extent to which
basic education needs are satisfied based on current enrolment patterns. For
this reason more complex indicators of the non-satisfaction of health and
education needs were defined as set out in Table 2; but even these cannot be
defined for all households.
The full set of indicators of needs satisfaction could be constructed for
1,098 households in Bangladesh and 764 in Peru. Figure 1 presents
histograms showing the number of needs not satisfied in the two countries.
This shows a wide variation in satisfaction of these needs across households
in both countries; unsurprisingly the average number of needs not satisfied
is greater in Bangladesh compared to Peru. In Peru 60 per cent of
households have between zero and two needs not satisfied, while
the corresponding percentage for Bangladesh is 33 per cent. The inequality
in the distribution of needs satisfied does not show much difference
between the two countries, except that a greater proportion of
households in Bangladesh experience the lower levels of needs satisfactions
than in Peru.
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Figure 1 Number of needs not satisfied in Bangladesh and Peru (Source: RANQ-Bangladesh 2004, WeD Research Group, University of Bath, UK)
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6 EXAMINING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RESOURCES
AND NEEDS
A first way of looking at the results of the questionnaire is to construct a
simple model of the resource profile of households and then compare this to
the levels of needs satisfaction that have been achieved. An initial
exploratory analysis of the relationship between needs satisfaction and the
profiles of resources is summarized in Table 3. Each of the five resource
categories is summarized here by summing up its different constituent
indicators, and then each household is classfied according to whether it has
high or low levels of command over each category of resource relative to
other surveyed households. Households can then be classified according to
the number of resource categories (from zero to five) where they have high
levels of command. In broad terms we might expect that households that
have high levels of command of more resource categories may be better
placed to meet needs, but this is not a perfect relationship; different
categories of resources may to some extent be substitutes for each other
rather than complements. Thus access to natural (public access) resources
may be important only for those households that are deprived in terms of
other resource categories.
Table 3 presents a simplified indicator of the resource profile of
households in the sample and relates these to the average level of
intermediate needs satisfaction of those households. For each of these
groups of household, the table reports the average level of non-satisfaction
of needs, computed as the simple unweighted sum of the ten zero-one
dummy variables defined in Table 2 above. For an individual household the
Table 3 Average number of intermediate needs not met, by household resourceendowment
Country
Number of resource categories where household hasrelatively high levels
0 1 2 3 4 5All
households
Bangladesh 6.3 5.1 4.7 3.7 2.8 3.4 4.2Peru 3.8 3.6 3.4 3.3 2.7 2.4 3.3
Source: RANQ-Bangladesh and RANQ-Peru (2004), WeD Research Group,University of Bath, UK.Notes: In the case of social, cultural, human and material resources, high levels ofcommand imply that the household has access to a total number of resources inthat category above the country average. High levels of access to natural resourcesmeans that the household has open access arrangements to one or more naturalresources which they do not own. A low level of resources implies the opposite ineach case.
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values of this sum can range from zero (satisfaction of all needs) to ten
(satisfaction of none).
As we might expect for the wealthier of the two countries the levels ofneeds not met are always lower in Peru than in Bangladesh. Also in Peru the
differences between the groups with different resource profiles are relatively
small compared to Bangladesh. In both cases the general result is that the
degree to which intermediate needs are satisfied increases with the number
of resource categories in which the household is calculated as having a high
level of command. This relationship is monotonic in the case of Peru, but as
noted above there is no reason to think that it necessarily should be. In
Bangladesh those with above average command in all five resourcecategories have lower levels of needs satisfaction than those with high
levels of command over four categories of resources. Further investigation
revealed that the crucial dimension here is natural resources. There is a
reasonable argument to suggest that in Bangladesh but not in Peru, having a
high level of command over natural resources may be an indicator of a
weakness or vulnerability in a household’s resource profile.
This descriptive analysis involves tentative procedures for combining
different indicators of resources into a single measure for each category. Theanalysis is helpfully indicative and a next step will be to explore the ways in
which command over different resource categories combines to produce
needs satisfaction outcomes in different community contexts. In particular
we will explore the ways in which command over social and cultural
resources modifies the needs satisfaction outcomes for households with
similar patterns of command over material and human resources.
The analysis can also be deepened by a different and more detailed
procedure which uses multivariate analysis to examine the relationshipbetween intermediate needs satisfied and different resource indicators taken
individually, as well as other relevant control variables (including location).
This is done here by means of an ordered probit model, where the number of
intermediate needs not satisfied (as above but aggregating the eleven
categories of needs satisfaction into a smaller number of groups to maintain
adequate sample size) is modelled as a function of each of the specific
resource indices and location variables (in particular community dummy
variables). These models are run for all sites together, as well as separatelyfor urban and rural areas, to allow for the fact that the relevant resources
may be significantly different in each case. Moreover, needs satisfaction is
higher on average in urban sites compared to rural sites; and some resource
indicators may be statistically significant in the national level model because
they are strongly correlated with location in a rural or urban area.
In interpreting the regression results (Table 4), negative coefficients
indicate factors that are associated with improved needs satisfaction. The
first most obvious finding from the regression results is confirmation of theimportance of material resources (in particular the level of assets owned by
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Table 4 Ordered probit regression results
Bangladesh Peru
All sample Urban Rural All sample Urban Rural
Social resourcesMember of any organization 20.014 0.226 20.192 0.042 0.134 20.172Participation in any collective
community activity20.171* 20.561*** 0.009 0.392*** 0.401*** 0.071
Kin and fictive connections 0.022 0.334** 20.021 20.111 20.018 20.282*Labour market:Work outside of the household 0.198 0.071 0.061 0.895 0.749 –Seeking job with family/friend
networks0.284* 20.726 0.288* 0.031 0.120 20.386
Connection to foodstuff market:Staple food buyer 0.203 0.323 0.307* – – –Connection to productive input
market20.007 20.063 0.118 0.365** 0.108 0.732*
Product seller 20.077 0.043 20.172 0.004 0.055 0.045Financial market:Household having a bank
account20.416*** 20.945*** 20.240** 0.026 0.028 0.009
Having a loan (excludingcommunity sources)
0.018 0.090 20.034 20.102 20.112 20.100
Connection to government:Household with any government
position0.024 20.113 0.137 0.183* 0.053 0.241*
Household with any closerelative with governmentposition
20.186** 20.040 20.312*** 20.196* 20.065 20.261*
Household use of governmentservices
20.239*** 0.215 20.391*** 20.147 20.647* 0.461
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Bangladesh Peru
All sample Urban Rural All sample Urban Rural
Connection to non-government:Household with any
non-government position20.069 0.057 20.084 20.021 0.295 20.108
Household with any closerelative with non-governmentposition
20.128 0.396* 20.347** 0.213 20.656 0.347
Household use ofnon-government services
20.045 20.355** 0.106 20.666*** 20.669 20.706***
Cultural resourcesHousehold speaks the dominant
language0.637 – 0.336 0.013 0.192 20.538
Household belongs to thedominant religion
20.220** 20.205 20.296** 20.042 0.035 20.084
Household with honorific title 20.196* 20.092 20.190 – – –
Material resourcesAsset ownership 20.054*** 20.021** 20.084*** 20.083*** 20.090*** 20.076***Livestock and small animal 0.011 20.006 0.015 20.001 0.194 20.002Total amount of land (has) 0.004 20.038 0.120* 20.026 0.299 20.039*Household owning dwelling 0.195* 0.118 20.004 0.056 0.077 0.024Household with regular work for
cash in main activity20.237*** 20.062 20.285*** 20.072 20.125 20.038
Natural resourcesOpen access to the natural
resources used20.046 0.165 20.043 0.099 0.293 0.071
Table 4 Continued
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Table 4 Continued
Bangladesh Peru
All sample Urban Rural All sample Urban Rural
Human resourcesUnskilled equivalent unit (UEA) 20.056** 0.036 20.095*** 20.040*** 20.037*** 20.045***
Location variablesDummy by site – BangladeshBichitropur 0.831*** – 20.185 – – –Achingaon 1.776*** – 0.672*** – – –Baniknagar 0.952*** 1.056*** – – – –Shantipur 1.041*** – – – – –Telkupigaon 1.442*** – 0.319**Dummy by site – PeruJatunllacta Iskay – – – 20.551** – 20.613**Llaqta Jock – – – 20.276 – 20.139Orccoupi Llacta – – – 0.437*** 0.332** –Jatun Llacta Jock – – – 0.064 – 0.034Llaqta Iskay – – – 1.424*** – 1.759***Selva Manta – – – 20.206 – –
Goodness of fitLog likelihood 21288.225 2405.051 2826.396 21061.778 2562.685 2473.096LR chi2 831.120 167.900 459.180 271.930 103.410 210.220Prob.chi2 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000Pseudo R2 0.244 0.172 0.217 0.114 0.084 0.182Sample size 1098 357 741 764 387 377
Notes: The coefficient estimates are only reported. (***): at 1% significance level; (**): at 5% significance level; (*): at 10% significancelevel.
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households) and human resources (the number of unskilled equivalent
workers), both of these having strongly significant positive associations with
needs satisfaction. This of course is consistent with the findings of manyother studies. But in this paper we are particularly interested in the two more
distinctive resource categories addressed by the RANQ, social and cultural
resources, in order to begin to discern some of the relationships in the social
and cultural construction of well-being that the RANQ analysis highlights.
In the case of cultural resources we find some evidence for these being
important in the case of Bangladesh, in that (outside urban sites) we find
that households that follow the dominant religion (Islam) have better needs
satisfaction outcomes than those that do not. There is some more tentativeevidence that households having a member with an honorific title (for
example, referring to the educational status, political position or religious
status of a senior member) tend to have higher levels of needs satisfaction.
However, in the case of Peru there is no evidence for significance of the
cultural resources identified here. This may be because these cultural
resources are not important, or because the sample is not differentiated
enough (98 per cent of households have a member speaking the dominant
language, and 85 per cent have a member practising the dominant religion –Roman Catholicism); or it may be simply that other cultural resources not
captured in the RANQ are the ones that are of particular importance.
Turning to social resources we find a considerable number of interesting
results and we will concentrate only on a small number of them here. Many
dimensions of social resources are strongly associated with needs satisfac-
tion in both countries, but the factors that are important vary from case to
case. Connection to government through the use of government services is
significantly associated with better needs satisfaction outcomes inBangladesh (though not in urban areas) and in the urban sites only in
Peru. In rural areas in Peru it is connection to services supplied by non-
government organizations that is important in being associated with better
needs satisfaction. This may be a reflection of limited provision of
government services, or the poor quality of these, in rural areas, such that
services provided by non-governmental organizations have substituted for
these. In the Bangladesh sites having a bank account (and therefore access
to financial services) is strongly associated with better needs satisfactionoutcomes (though this does not imply anything about the direction of
causality). In Peru though this is not a significant factor; but only 5 per cent
of households surveyed in Peru reported having a bank account, compared
to 43 per cent in Bangladesh. In both Bangladesh and Peru having a close
relative in a government position is associated with higher levels of needs
satisfaction, though this result is only significant at the 10 per cent level in
some cases.
In Bangladesh participation in community activities or membership of anorganization are associated with higher levels of needs satisfaction. By
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contrast in Peru being a participant in a collective community activity is
negatively correlated with needs satisfaction, while the impact of being a
member of an organization is statistically insignificant. To some extent this
may reflect the nature of the activities or organizations. In Peru 48 per cent
of those in collective community activities were working on community
tasks and 12 per cent participated in the vaso de leche programme (a food
transfer and nutrition scheme – see Copestake 2006), targeted to expectant
mothers and children under the age of seven, among others). The results
indicate that more deprived households have been, as is the intention,
disproportionately selected into these activities.
By contrast, in Bangladesh the community activities and organizations
are generally village-based or organized by non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), of which there are many well-known and very effective examples
(for example, the Grameen Bank and BRAC). It is possible that
participation in these organizations is a channel by which households can
improve their levels of needs satisfaction. However, a debate persists in
Bangladesh around the argument that the success of these organizations
reflects the fact that their membership is drawn largely from upper strata of
the poor. A combination of these two possibilities might apply, which would
support a view that has been advanced in Bangladesh that NGOs may
contribute to a process of ongoing polarization among the population, with
the poorest being excluded and moving towards destitution and participants
achieving some dynamic benefits to at least maintain or improve their
situation. Which of these views applies though cannot be determined from
these data alone.
The contrast between Peru and Bangladesh in this respect highlights that
these specific social resources may play very different roles in enabling or
hindering households to improve their needs satisfaction, but to understand
the underlying mechanisms calls for a dynamic analysis not permitted by
these data alone. In summary, this very preliminary analysis of the initial
results of the RANQ survey in two countries highlights clearly the expected
relationship between resources commanded by households, and satisfaction
of intermediate needs; but the relationships between resources and needs are
complex and show some variations from case to case. In both countries, as
expected, human and material resources are strongly associated with the
overall satisfaction of intermediate needs. Natural resources are not strongly
associated with needs satisfaction, and in Bangladesh at least this resource
category is seen often to be more important for those with lower levels of
human and material resources. Even these first results demonstrate that it
has been possible to construct some measures of social and cultural
resources using a survey tool, and to understand how these relate or not to
needs satisfaction. The nature of these relationships varies from case to case;
but there is considerable scope to understand this better based on further
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analysis of the RANQ data, as well as by complementary qualitative
analysis using households already surveyed by the RANQ.
6 CONCLUSIONS
The WeD research programme sets out a distinctive approach to
understanding well-being in developing countries. In this paper we have
described the operationalization of a methodology which combines
quantitative and qualitative methods in an effort to better understand the
social and cultural construction of well-being in specific developing country
contexts. In particular it is a methodology that seeks to generate insightsinto why poverty persists for some people and households in particular
developing country contexts. A key component of the well-being framework
concerns the relationship between resources commanded by households and
the levels of needs satisfaction. The Resources and Needs Questionnaire
(RANQ), on which this paper focuses, generates data which provide the
basis for a first step to understanding the relationship between resources and
needs, and particularly measures of command over what may be important
social and cultural resources in each societal context.The preliminary analysis generates striking and plausible results. They
affirm generally that social and cultural resources do appear to matter. The
preparation of simple resource profiles for households, which indicate their
level of command in each resource category, yield insights that call for
further inquiry. In particular, it suggests the need to explore the relationship
between different categories of resources in respect of success or failure in
satisfying intermediate needs.
Further statistical analysis reveals that a number of the measures of socialand cultural resources are significant correlates of needs satisfaction. The
explanation of these correlations will often differ from case to case (for
example, which factors matter and how this works) but they do so in ways
which accord with existing interpretations. Through this we build the case
for recognition that social and cultural resources are significant at a
universal level for understanding how different households meet or fail to
meet needs, but equally affirm that the local details of the processes involved
are essential for correct interpretation of the results. The findings provideguidance both for further in-depth quantitative analysis of these data, as
well as for the use of complementary qualitative research on the social,
economic, political and cognitive processes which are at work in the
relationship between resources and needs satisfaction.
From a methodological perspective, the paper highlights the value of data
collection approaches which reflect the underlying conceptual framework
for understanding well-being, rather than having to rely on existing, more
standardized surveys, which are designed for different purposes and fromdifferent conceptual standpoints. It also demonstrates a degree of success in
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measuring social and cultural resources in ways which can point to some of
the complexity of the mechanisms by which these operate. There is
undoubtedly scope to refine the questionnaire further to capture theseaspects better and it is important to emphasize that quantitative analysis of
these aspects, especially based on a one-off, outcome-focused survey, will
always have its limitations and for policy purposes cannot stand on its own.
Complementing such analysis with more data generated from other, often
more qualitative, elements of the well-being research methodology (in
particular focusing on processes) is likely to provide a stronger evidence
base with which to formulate and implement effective poverty-focused
interventions.
J. Allister McGregor,
University of Bath
Andrew McKay
University of Sussex and University of Bath
Jackeline Velazco
University of Girona (Spain), Catholic University of Peru and
University of Bath
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is
gratefully acknowledged. The work was part of the programme of the ESRC
Research Group on Wellbeing in Developing Countries.
NOTES
1 See www.welldev.org.uk/.2 See the WeD Methods Toolbox for further details of this (www.welldev.org.uk/
research/methods-toolbox/).3 See the WeD Methods Toolbox for further details of this (www.welldev.org.uk/
research/methods-toobox/).
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