Kagera Health and Development Survey 2010

Because people have moved out of their original household, the new sample in KHDS 2004 consists of over 2,700 households from the baseline 832, which were re-contacted. Much of the success in re-contacting respondents was due to the effort to track people who had moved out of the baseline villages. One-half of all households interviewed were tracking cases, meaning they did not reside in the baseline communities. Of those households tracked, only 38 percent were located nearby the baseline community. Overall, 32 percent of all households were not located near the baseline communities. While tracking is costly, it is an important exercise because migration and dissolution of households are often hypothesized to be important responses to hardship. Excluding these households in the sample raises obvious concerns regarding the selectivity of attrition. In particular, out-migration from the village, dissolving of households, and even marriage, may be responses to adult mortality. At the same time, tracking 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 themselves constitute a poverty trap. Turning to recontact rates of the sample of 6,204 respondents, Re-interview rates are monotonically decreasing with age, although the reasons (deceased or not located) vary by age group. The older respondents were much more likely to be located if living, which is consistent with higher migration rates among the young adults in the sample. Among the youngest respondents, over three-quarter were successfully re-interviewed. Excluding people who died, 82 percent of all respondents were re-interviewed. Without tracking, re-interview rates of surviving respondents would have fallen from 82 percent to 52 percent. Non-local migration is not trivial; restricting the tracking to nearby villages would have resulted in 63 percent recontact of survivors. Migration proved to be an important factor in determining whether someone was re-contacted. Respondents who were untraced were much more likely to be residing outside Kagera (52 percent) compare to their counterparts who were re-interviewed (9 percent). KHDS 2004 tracked international migrants for Uganda only. Although the location of those in other countries was known, they were not traced. For those respondents who were not re-interviewed, the KHDS 2004 gives some information about their interactions with the re-interviewed respondents. Survey modules on the frequency of contact with all previous household members inform on the cash, in-kind and labour interactions between former household members.