Hargreaves, James R.

Health researchers often wish to study the impact of wealth on health outcomes. To do this they must collect data on social and economic factors. However, the collection of detailed data on income and expenditure is rare in health studies in developing countries. Instead, researchers generally adopt more rapid procedures based on survey methodology. Increasingly this has included the use of Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to generate a number of separate indicators of welfare. An alternative approach is to utilise participatory wealth ranking to generate a measure of household wealth.

This paper looks at the links between qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. Participatory techniques to investigate poverty have been used in development research and practice for some time, but have been used less in other fields. However there is increasing interest in using participatory methods in generating statistics to influence policy, and Participatory Wealth Ranking (PWR) is one tool widely used already. This paper describes the generation of poverty data collected in a large-scale application of PWR in rural South Africa.