Although the security situation had improved significantly since 2014, many parts of the country were still insecure in 2017. Thus, nine out of ten districts in Nineveh governorate, the seat of Daesh-occupied Iraq, were intentionally excluded from the sampling frame. As the data collection proceeded, five additional districts – three in Anbar, one in Baghdad, and one in Salah al-din – were judged to be too insecure for fieldwork, so the selected enumeration areas from these areas were replaced with other clusters from the same governorate. Thus, the final sample covers only 106 of 120 districts in the country, or 74 of 88 districts from the governorates outside the Kurdistan region.

The sampling strategy for the 2017 survey proceeded in conventional two stages of cluster sampling. First, within each governorate, the out-of-camp sample was selected using the exhaustive list of census enumeration areas (EAs) as primary sampling units (PSUs). Between 60 to 150 EAs in each governorate were selected using a probability proportional to size (PPS) criterion, with the number of households in each area as the measure of size. A total of 1,440 enumeration areas were selected in the first stage. A listing exercise was conducted in the selected areas to update the list of households. In the second stage, using households as secondary sampling units (SSUs), six households were selected in each cluster with equal probability from the post-listing sampling frame. In selecting six households from a cluster, three each of IDP and non-IDP households were selected in the non-Kurdistan region. In the Kurdistan region, two each of IDP, non-IDP, and Syrian refugee households were selected. In clusters where there were not enough IDP and/or refugee households, resident households filled the shortfall. Table 1 summarizes the sampling design and the response rate for the survey.

The survey sampled 8,615 households, with everyone responding to a short questionnaire that collected information on household demography, education, employment and other core non-monetary indicators of well-being (“short-form”). A random subset of 1,500 sampled households also responded to a set of questions on household food consumption and non-food expenditure (“long-form”). While the short form sample was representative for each governorate, the long-form sample was representative only for four regions: Kurdistan, North, Center, and South. The consumption modules included food items purchased in the market as well as those received through the PDS.

The survey also provides information on the displacement status of household members. Internal displacement has a well-defined status in Iraq. The Ministry of Migration and Displacement (MoDM) is the government agency with the remit of registering internally displaced persons. Registered households are issued an identification card recognizing their status as internally displaced, and the card makes them eligible for assistance issued by the government or other parties. The survey asked if any member in the household is an IDP and, if so, how many. Additionally, the survey respondents were asked about number of refugees in the household and whether the household experienced forced displacement since January 2014. We categorized a household as displaced if any of its members are IDPs or refugees or if the household was forced to relocate from its place of origin. Using the criterion, 1,849 households in the sample are classified as displaced units.<sup>8</sup> Table 2 (columns 1 to 4) reports descriptive statistics by displacement status. While almost all (97 percent) of the non-displaced families in Iraq received transfers through the PDS in the 12 months preceding the survey, only 86 percent of the displaced families received the assistance. Compared to the non-displaced families, the displaced have significantly greater household size and dependency ratio, mostly due to having more children. Other characteristics such as age, marital status and educational attainment of the household head and the highest level of education attained by adult members, however, are statistically

> 8 Almost all households were either entirely comprised of IDPs or contained none at all; very few were mixed.

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