# **4.4.1 Overview of the Survey**

Listening to South Caucasus (L2SC) is an expansion of a collaborative effort that has been conducted in multiple countries in the Europe and Central Asian region. This initiative aims to comprehensively monitor the views and well-being of a representative group of people as the government introduces social and economic reforms that affect every business and citizen. By reflecting on the experience of this group over the years, the study provides an up-to-date understanding of how policies reflect on people’s daily lives. The study comprises a nationally representative baseline survey and a high-frequency panel survey of a subset of the baseline participant households. The information collected through the L2SC initiative informs reform efforts directly by raising the profile of citizens’ views and enabling in-depth economic analysis.

While the L2SC survey covers Armenia and Georgia, this paper focuses on the baseline survey in Armenia— Listening to Armenia (L2Arm)—where the new national sampling frame based on pre-EAs has been proposed.<sup>17</sup>

# **4.4.2 Sampling Design**

The sampling design optimizes the spatial allocation of the household sample to provide valid representativeness at the national level for both urban and rural areas. A two-stage stratified cluster sampling design is employed to select participating households, ensuring a balanced sample distribution across regions<sup>18</sup> and accounting for differences between urban and rural areas, survey budgets, and discrepancies in population estimates. The L2Arm survey’s implementation highlighted the robustness of the sampling frame, as it successfully captured the population distribution across diverse geographic and demographic strata. The use of probability proportional to size (PPS) sampling ensured that the selection process was equitable and aligned with population estimates, further validating the practicality of the proposed approach.

In the first stage, a certain number of primary sampling units (PSUs) will be selected in each urban and rural stratum (urban and rural areas within each administrative region). In the second stage, the ultimate sampling units or the secondary sampling units (SSUs)—households in the case of L2SC—are randomly selected within each PSU. The survey is then implemented among the selected households. Given that our focus in this paper is on the first stage of the two-stage procedure, the sampling frame used for the survey in the first stage is highlighted.

**Sampling Frame:** As mentioned, the sampling frame is based on pre-census enumeration areas (pre-EAs) providing the most accurate information on the geographic distribution of the population across Armenia. This allows for the most precise formulation of a sample design.

**Sample Size:** The objective of any sample design is to achieve the highest precision in indicators of interest given survey parameters. The sampling design aims to efficiently allocate the given PSUs across strata and

> 17 The Listening to Georgia (L2Geo) leverages the national sampling frame based on the 2014 Census with population updated by 2022 and 9,514 enumeration areas as PSUs. The preference to use comparable frames in Georgia and Armenia was one of the motivations for developing a new national sampling frame in Armenia based on pre-EAs in this paper.

> 18 A balanced sample refers to a sample where the means of covariates are equal to the population means of those covariates, ensuring that the sample is representative of the population of interest (Brown et al., 2015).

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