SAGA Progress Report-2004-Annex-Research-Multi-Country

SAGA
B16 MVR Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
(607) 255-8931
Fax (607) 255-0178
saga@cornell.edu

SAGA PROGRESS REPORT (12/03-12/04) &
UPCOMING WORKPLAN (1/05-12/05)

ANNEX

II. RESEARCH
G. MULTI-COUNTRY STUDIES

HIV/AIDS

Our work on HIV prevention knowledge, as well as in HIV testing behavior and attitudes toward testing, has focused on taking advantage of a number of African countries in which more than one round of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) with comparable HIV-related information has been carried out. We examine changes in these outcomes in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia over periods of 3 to 6 years during the mid to late 90s and early 00s, as dictated by the survey years. In addition we ask how changes in knowledge and testing behavior are distributed across the distributions of schooling and household income as well as by gender and rural vs. urban location. We address this question descriptively and econometrically, the latter by estimating and comparing statistically HIV knowledge ‘returns’ to schooling, wealth, and age in early and later survey years. These questions are important for policymaking. For example, if the impact of schooling on the probability of knowing that condoms can prevent infection is found to have risen over time, this would indicate that public information campaigns have been more successful at reaching the better educated, or else at providing information that is more easily processed by them. It would signal a need to better target or tailor messages to those with less schooling. Similar considerations would apply to findings of an increasing gradient with respect to wealth, or to increasing or persistent rural-urban and gender gaps in HIV/AIDS knowledge. The paper is available at

http://www.springerlink.com/content/1432-1475/?k=Changes+in+HIV%2fAIDS

Also, forthcoming is “Scaling up HIV Voluntary Counseling and Testing in Africa: What Can Evaluation Studies Tell Us About Potential Prevention Impacts?” by Peter Glick.

“Q-Squared”—Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Poverty Analysis

The SAGA proposal noted that while our analytical base would be quantitative-economic in nature, we would also engage in limited exploration, where possible and where there was interest among our partner institutions, methods that go beyond conventional methods to qualitative approaches and, in particular, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. The country-specific manifestations of this are provided in individual country reports.

However, SAGA also fits into a broader process at Cornell of investigating and exploring the possibilities of “Q-Squared” Poverty Analysis. This is seen as a three-stage project. The first stage was conceptual, setting out the broad parameters of collaboration between quantitative and qualitative approaches in poverty analysis. A volume entitled Q-Squared was published in 2003. The second stage is empirical. A conference was organized jointly by Cornell and the University of Toronto in May 2004, with financial support from DFID and IDRC, where a number of papers using mixed methods were presented (http://www.utoronto.ca/mcis/q2/).

A selection of these papers will be published as a special issue of the journal World Development. The third stage will focus on combining mixed methods in the context of policy making and policy dialogue. Discussions on these are just beginning, and we expect the conference to take place in 2006.

Return to Annex Table of Contents

Previous Section | Next Section

Return to 2004 SAGA Annual Report and Workplan for 2005