The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the randomized household survey experiment set up and describes the data. Section 3 assesses the differences in reporting by survey treatment status and reports the findings. Section 4 evaluates the impact on proxy-based poverty measurement. Section 5 concludes.

# 2. DATA

The methodological experiment on proxy-based poverty measurement (hereafter referred to as “the experiment”) was integrated into the Malawi Integrated Household Panel Survey (IHPS) 2013, which was implemented using paper questionnaires and face-to-face interviews. The IHPS attempted to track and resurvey 3,246 households across 204 enumeration areas (EAs) that had been surveyed for the Third Integrated Household Survey (IHS3) 2010/11.<sup>9</sup> The survey was implemented by the National Statistical Office (NSO), and had been designed at baseline to be representative at the national-, urban/rural, regional levels, and for the six strata defined by the combinations of region and urban/rural domains. The IHPS targeted all individuals that were part of the IHS3, including those that moved away from the IHS3 dwelling locations between 2010 and 2013. Once a split-off individual was located, the new household that he/she formed or joined since the IHS3 interview was brought into the IHPS sample. As a result, the overall IHPS database includes 4,000 households, which could be traced back to 3,104 IHS3 households.<sup>10,11</sup> The main IHPS fieldwork was carried out during the period of April-October 2013, with residual tracking operations conducted during the period of November-December 2013. The survey attempted to visit each household twice, identical to the IHS3 practice, within two weeks of the baseline interview timeframe, and with approximately three months in between visits. At baseline, the IHPS EAs had been randomly divided into two halves, known as Sample A and Sample B EAs, and the questionnaire load for households in these EAs had been split differently across visits. During the IHPS, Sample A households were administered the standard household questionnaire during Visit 1, and had simply received an update to the household roster module in Visit 2. In contrast, Sample B households had received only the household roster module of

> 9 The IHPS 2013 and the IHS3 were supported by the Living Standards Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) initiative, whose primary objective is to provide financial and technical support to governments in sub-Saharan Africa in the design and implementation of nationally-representative multi-topic panel household surveys with a strong focus on agriculture. The IHPS 2013 and IHS3 data and documentation are publically available on www.worldbank.org/lsms.

> 10 Attrition was limited to only 3.78 and 7.42 percent, at household and individual levels, respectively.

> 11 The interviewer training for the experiment was part of the IHPS field staff training; as such it was hands-on and extensive. During the fieldwork, the field staff was under continuous quality control. The threat of (and actual) supervisor re-interviews of households and systematic interviewer evaluations by the IHPS management attempted to prevent interviewer-specific tendencies from culminating. This was reinforced by ensuring in each half of the fieldwork that the experiment workload was spread evenly across the interviewers, alongside their main IHPS assignments. The experiment data processing and quality control protocols were identical to the IHPS protocols.

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