Questionnaires
The PECS questionnaire consists of two main sections:
First: Survey's Questionnaire
Part of the questionnaire is to be filled in during the visit at the beginning of the month, while the other part is to be filled in at the end of the month. The questionnaire includes:
Control Sheet: Includes household's identification data, date of visit, data on the fieldwork and data processing team, and summary of household's members by gender.
Household Roster: Includes demographic, social, and economic characteristics of household's members.
Housing Characteristics: Includes data like type of housing unit, number of rooms, value of rent, and connection of housing unit to basic services like water, electricity and sewage. In addition, data in this section includes source of energy used for cooking and heating, distance of housing unit from transportation, education, and health centers, and sources of income generation like ownership of farm land or animals.
Food and Non-Food Items: includes food and non-food items, and household record her expenditure for one month.
Durable Goods Schedule: Includes list of main goods like washing machine, refrigerator, TV.
Assistances and Poverty: Includes data about cash and in kind assistances (assistance value, assistance source), also collecting data about household situation, and the procedures to cover expenses.
Monthly and Annual Income: Data pertinent to household's income from different sources is collected at the end of the registration period.
Second: List of Goods
The classification of the list of goods is based on the recommendation of the United Nations for the SNA under the name Classification of Personal Consumption by purpose. The list includes 55 groups of expenditure and consumption where each is given a sequence number based on its importance to the household starting with food goods, clothing groups, housing, medical treatment, transportation and communication, and lastly durable goods. Each group consists of important goods. The total number of goods in all groups amounted to 667 items for goods and services. Groups from 1-21 includes goods pertinent to food, drinks and cigarettes. Group 22 includes goods that are home produced and consumed by the household. The groups 23-45 include all items except food, drinks and cigarettes. The groups 50-55 include durable goods. The data is collected based on different reference periods to represent expenditure during the whole year except for cars where data is collected for the last three years.
Registration Form
The registration form includes instructions and examples on how to record consumption and expenditure items. The form includes columns:
* Monetary: If the good is purchased, or in kind: if the item is self produced.
* Title of the service of the good
* Unit of measurement (kilogram, liter, number)
* Quantity
* Value
The pages of the registration form are colored differently for the weeks of the month. The footer for each page includes remarks that encourage households to participate in the survey. The following are instructions that illustrate the nature of the items that should be recorded:
* Monetary expenditures during purchases
* Purchases based on debts
* Monetary gifts once presented
* Interest at pay
* Self produced food and goods once consumed
* Food and merchandise from commercial project once consumed
* Merchandises once received as a wage or part of a wage from the employer.