# **3.1 Questionnaire design and methodological considerations**

To explore the scope for measuring different elements of land tenure security in a way that is cost-effective and replicable, the SDG land tenure module was embedded in Zambia’s 2018 LFS with an incremental budget of US$ 50,000. Building on the SDG module (FAO _et al_ , 2018), four sets of land-related issues were added to the survey instrument: First, to avoid that gender information will be available only for parcels with documented rights, we inquire about land users as well as owners and ask whether land can be transferred by either bequest or sale and, if yes if females have a say in either case.<sup>11</sup> Second, we ask for presence of formal or informal documents from a list of locally accepted documents, classifying them into full and partial titles (e.g., letters of offer or ‘intention to treat’), as well as informal documents (‘chief’s certificates’), and cross-check title holders’ names against the roster of household members and their gender to assess if land is held individually or jointly by women. Third, we ask questions on perceived tenure security, an issue that will be important if coverage with or the evidentiary value of formal documents are limited, e.g., due to lack of authoritative registries or fraud-proof procedures. Recognizing that, based on the literature, subjective perceptions may suffer from several types of bias,<sup>12</sup> we frame this as a question on owners’ perception of the risk (on a 1-5 scale) of losing a parcel in the next 5 years, in line with the SDG questionnaire. Finally, we ask directly if respondents would want to apply for title and, if yes, the amount they would be willing to pay for it. The rationale for doing so is that perceived tenure insecurity may only imperfectly correlate with demand for formal documentation; those who report being secure may still want a formal document (e.g., for easier land transfers) while those who are insecure may not see formal documents as a beneficial or affordable solution.

As renters would scarcely know the nature of their landlords’ documentation and factors causing them to be tenure insecure may be unrelated to levels of tenure security provided by documented land rights,<sup>13</sup> we drop households who rent their primary residence or access employer-provided free housing and own no other land. This results in a sample of 7,113 land owners who, based on sample weights, represent 2.4 million of Zambia’s estimated 3.5 million households. As the LFS deployment schedule did not allow pre-testing, challenges in the survey’s start-up phase led to rather high non-response rates.<sup>14</sup> Means and t-tests for differences of means for key variables between the 4,888 land owning households (excluding renters) who

> 11 If mobile penetration is high, innovative technology solutions such as automatic notification of all interested parties in case of an attempted transfer, can potentially put a check on such abuses and are currently being experimented with in a range of countries.

> 12 Responses on perceptions will be affected by framing (Abraham _et al._ 2018; Hopkins and Mummolo 2017), limited attention (Foellmi _et al._ 2016), self-centeredness (Proto and Sgroi 2017), scope for strategic responses (Gal and Gal 2014), and halo effects (Hong and Liskovich 2015). Even experts’ assessments of property rights security have been shown to be affected by bias (Stubbs _et al._ 2014).

> 13 Owners’ renting out land, especially for long periods, requires enough trust in land administration and legal systems to allow recovery of the asset. 14 To avoid disturbing the flow of the LFS instrument, the land module was appended at the end of the questionnaire and some enumerators seem to have considered the module as optional before a re-training as well as a revision of the survey instrument to add the gender of land owners was conducted at the half-time review by all enumerators.

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