Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP15961
Authors: Seema Jayachandran; Monica Biradavolu; Jan Cooper
Abstract: We propose a new method to design a short survey measure of a complex concept such as women's agency. The approach combines mixed-methods data collection and machine learning. We select the best survey questions based on how strongly correlated they are with a "gold standard" measure of the concept derived from qualitative interviews. In our application, we measure agency for 209 women in Haryana, India, first, through a semi-structured interview and, second, through a large set of close-ended questions. We use qualitative coding methods to score each woman's agency based on the interview, which we treat as her true agency. To identify the close-ended questions most predictive of the "truth," we apply statistical algorithms that build on LASSO and random forest but constrain how many variables are selected for the model (five in our case). The resulting five-question index is as strongly correlated with the coded qualitative interview as is an index that uses all of the candidate questions. This approach of selecting survey questions based on their statistical correspondence to coded qualitative interviews could be used to design short survey modules for many other latent constructs.
Keywords: womens empowerment; survey design; feature selection; psychometrics
JEL Codes: C83; D13; J16; O12
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| selected survey questions (C83) | women's agency (J16) |
| qualitative interview scores (C99) | women's agency (J16) |
| selected survey questions (C83) | true agency (L85) |
| five-question index (C43) | qualitative measures of agency (C25) |
| survey index from selected questions (C83) | explanatory power (C20) |
| qualitative interviews (C90) | true measure of agency (L85) |