Approaches to data analysis

For quantitative data analysis, multivariate analysis and decomposition framework have been

Table 6. The numbers of total, rural and urban sample households, and individuals

Observations HIES 2000 HES 1995

All Rural Urban All Rural Urban

Sample Households Individuals Adult: Children 7440 38518 23447 15071 5040 26231 15548 10683 2400 12287 7899 4388 7420 39501 22482 16569 5040 26453 14794 11659 2380 12598 7688 4910 Source: .

Bangladesh Household Expenditure Survey (HES)-1995 and Bangladesh Household Income nad Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2000. Note: All statistics are in numbers.

used. The quantitative data was used to identify the poor and also to analyse the poverty profile (Chapter 5); and how economic growth has affected the development of poverty (in a comparative framework in Chapter 7). As mentioned earlier, the measurement of poverty used in quantitative studies is usually income poverty.

For measuring and defining child (income) poverty, “International Poverty Line” (one dollar per person per day) is employed throughout the dissertation unless otherwise indicated, which has been defined by the World Bank. This measure is widely used for the developing world (see for example, Dieden & Gustafsson, 2003; Gordon et al., 2003). Deaton (2006, p. 12) states: “The World Bank uses this poverty line, a common international poverty line, designed to be appropriate for extreme poverty, defined as poverty in the poorest countries”. I brought into notice briefly about some of the controversies (see for example contributions in Anand, Segal and Stiglitz, 2010) with regard to the limitations of this line in section 2.4. The most recent update on this is found in Ravallion, Chen, and Sangraula (2009). This paper presents major update of the international “$1 a day” poverty line, which has been raised to$1.25 PPP in 2005 prices.

A serious limitation this dissertation shares with all poverty measurement is the issue of intra-household allocation, which has not been taken into consideration. That is the process (Haddad, Hoddinott, & Alderman, 1997) by which time, money, and other resources are allocated within households. In this dissertation, it has been measured, firstly, if a household as an entity is poor,then it deems that all children living in the household are poor. In reality, some children in non-poor households have low consumption and in some poor households some children have high consumption due to the differences of age, sex, household composition, etc. However, the appropriate estimation of intra-household allocation from the conventional income data used for this study is not possible.

Considering limitations of the alternatives, I prefer an income based poverty line for measuring child poverty in Bangladesh, because, poverty measurement solely in terms of in- come is widely used in child poverty research. As mentioned earlier, the poverty line has been calculated at Tk. 500.16 per capita per month by estimating in terms of PPP in 1985 prices for Bangladeshi currency, the Taka. The main reason for selecting it for child poverty measurement

is its acceptance for comparability at the international level. An alternative poverty line, USD 2 PPP, has also been used here in Chapter 5 to examine the robustness of the results obtained from the International Poverty Line. This line has been calculated at Tk. 1000.32 by doubling the USD 1 per day poverty line (International Poverty Line). It should be mentioned here that there is no official measure for assessing child poverty in Bangladesh.

Using this poverty line, child poverty has been measured for the population of Bangla- desh in which children are considered as poor if they live in households with disposable per capita income lower than 1 USD PPP (Purchasing Power Parity).The same poverty line is employed and updated only with the changes in consumer price index (see Chapter 5 and Chapter 7). To investi- gate how child poverty varies across a number of variables, such as children’s age, sex, residence, religion have been used. In addition, other variables such as household heads’ educational level, employment status, and marital status, access to land, age, sex, household size, and religion have been examined as well. However, due to data limitations variables such as health indicators and natural calamities and others have not been studied.

The unit of analysis plays a vital role in research, particularly in child poverty research. There are different units: households, family and individual (Corak, 2006a). The analyst’s choice of appropriate income receiving unit often considered the household; and, the unit of analysis is the individual; household income per capita is considered to each member of the same household. From these considerations, work is done in two steps. At first, income of all members of a house- hold has been considered to estimate per capita income. Next, based on the per capita income, households and all of their members are classified as poor or not. From this classification de- scriptive statistics are made, for example computing poverty rates for all children in Bangladesh, belonging to a particular category etc. As mentioned earlier, I assumed that incomes are equally distributed within household regardless of sex, age, birth order etc. In reality, however, this is not probably the case.

In Chapter 5 multivariate analyses show how different variables affect the probability of a child being poor. I consider a child’s probability of being poor in terms of given socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the child or his/her household head. At this stage the main

unit of analysis is the child, although characteristics of the household head are used as explana- tory variables in some cases. Children under study of this dissertation are those individuals that are aged up to 14. It is difficult in the Bangladeshi cultural context to specify the age when an individual is considered a child because the word in Bengali language for “child” has different meaning than what is meant in the bench mark of UNCRC (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child)29_{. Concerning this, quoting from other studies, Haider (2008, p. 52) describes:}

There is no Bengali word to describe the life stage from birth to the age of 18, the bench- mark embraced by the UNCRC…“shishu”, the word in the “Bangla” language for “child”, has a meaning quite different from that spelt out in the UNCRC.

Considering this cultural complexity, the individuals aged up to 14, minimum age re- quired up to junior (class 8) schooling, have been considered as children. For counting the poor, the most commonly used measure head count ratio has been employed. Child poverty rate has been calculated by dividing the total number of poor children by the total number of children.

Multivariate analysis involves observation and analysis of more than one statistical vari- able at a time. Since child poverty has been assumed to be associated with a number of variables, I made use of this method for quantitative studies. Firstly, logistic regression has been used (see Chapter 5). I examined the influence of a number of independent variables such as location (both regions and rural and urban) of residence of a child, age of child and household head’s charac- teristics (education, employment, marital status etc.) on the variations of the dependent variable, child poverty. Secondly, in Chapter 7, a decomposition framework (see Danziger & Gottschalk, 1995) has been used for poverty comparisons between two countries (Bangladesh and China) over a time. Applying this method, the differences in poverty that have been observed between situations A and B are due to three components: differences in average income, differences in demographic composition and differences in the distribution of income.

Finally, in Chapter 5, I also looked at the notion of wellbeing by examining the poor chil- dren’s living condition in terms of access to some variables, such as safe shelter, safe water and electricity. This provides an idea of how many of poor children are deprived of their rights to basic

human needs. Quantitative researchers use similar approaches to measure deprivation poverty for developing countries (see Gordon et al., 2003). Additionally, for a better understanding of depri- vation and suffering regarding fulfilling basic needs, the reflection from the qualitative study has been used in Chapter 6 and Chapter 8.