Study Name: Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS)

Study Directors:Luis N. Rubalcava and Graciela Teruel

Host Organizations: Universidad Iberoamericana and Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, A.C.

Year Initiated: 2000

 

 

Governance

 

-         Funding Sources

 

The Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (National Council of Science and Technology--Governmental Institution in Mexico) primarily funds the design of the core questionnaires of the MxFLS and the seminars with national academics and public sector. The Ford Foundation,the Hewlett Foundation and UC-MEXUS have also provided funding for the design and collection of specific modules.

 

-         Host Organizations

 

The study is conducted by the Department of Economics at the Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA) and the Division of Economics at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, A.C. (CIDE), both located in Mexico City.

 

-         Governing body and role of external research advisors.

 

The governing body has been recently constituted by researchers in both host organizations. The MxFLS project already counts with the support and advice of research centers and international academic institutions with broad experience in survey design.On this matter, cooperation agreements have been set with researchers and academics from the Demography Department of Colegio de México, the Economics Department of the UniversityCollege London, RAND, The Hospital of Perinatology in Mexico City, The Hospital of Psychiatry in Mexico City and Mexican Institute of Social Security.

 

Sample Design

 

-         Sample selection

 

The MxFLS will be composed of data on households and their communities, gathered in two separate points in time,2001 (MxFLS1) and 2004 (MxFLS2), with an approximate baseline sample size of 8,000 households in different localities. This survey will be representative at the national, urban and rural levels. We will randomly select localities in each of the 32 states of Mexico and then randomly select householdsfrom those localities.

The selection of the sample will be developed in March 2001.

The national representative characteristic of the MxFLS is an advantage of this survey over alternative sources of information existent in Mexico.

-         Follow Rules

All household members interviewed in the first waive will be tracked in the second waive, regardless of whether they have established new households or not. We will seek re-contact rates over 90%.

-         Oversampling

The possibility of oversampling migrants to the US, and crime victims is currently being discussed.

-         Weight and attrition bias

The sample will be re-weighted every waive.

Content

-         Driving lack of multidimensional information

-         Driving policy needs

-         Research objectives (maintaining coherence of content domains)

-         Benefits of international comparability

-         Content decisions (income, expenditure, wealth, health, nutrition, fertility, prenatal care, education, employment, migration, victimization, health and educational facilities in thecommunity, intra-household allocation and data linking)

Collection

-         Mode

The MxFLS will be collected in face-to-face interviews using paper and pencil questionnaires. Thereupon, an in-field software package will be used to enter the information collected during the interview both while still in the fieldwork and in the central office.

-         Instrument design

The design of the project is being developed by the UIA and CIDE, in collaboration with researchers from the Economics Department of UCL, the Demography Department of Colegio de México, the Health Department of UIA, the Migration Center of Colegio de México and the advice from experts at RAND.Interdisciplinary teams have been formed to develop the different parts of the survey.

To maximize the participation of different scholars in the design of the instrument, two series of seminars for each module were held at the CIDE and UIA. In accordance with the mutipurpose feature of the project, the MxFLS team invited researchers with different specialization to each seminar series in order to enhance the feasibility of the instrument. Scholars with different academic backgrounds, such as economists, political scientists, lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists, physicians and nutritionists were invited to collaborate in the seminar series.Currently the first of two pilots is being run to test the performance of each module; and two pre-fieldwork tests are scheduled to verify the consistency, fluency, skip-patterns sequence and coherence of the entire instrument..The second pre-test (larger than the first one) is scheduled to rehearse the real fieldwork.At this phase, the questionnaire, the supervision fieldwork mechanism and the entry software package will be tested simultaneously.

-         Interviewing

Every adult and child member of the household will be interviewed. Each adult will answer an “adult questionnaire”, and the mother of the children under 10 (or other child responsible person) will answer the “child questionnaire”.In addition every women in reproductive age will be given a separate set of questions.

-         Calendar year, survey year and point of survey measures

The first waive will be collected in August 2001 and the second waive in August 2004.

Processing

-         Family composition editing

A new editing system is being developed at UIA that will greatly improve data editing processes, including family composition.

-         Production of specialized files

Files containing the different modules of the data will be created at the central office.Standard formats will be used and will be available for download through internet.

-         Data and documentation standards

Documentation of materials and data will be produced in both English and Spanish and will be available from internet.

Dissemination

-         Dissemination techniques

Customized data sets will be freely available to download at the MxFLS web site.CD´s will be created upon.

-         Comparability of formats

Formats will be assessed and improved after every waive, but inter-waives comparability will be strongly sought .

-         Value of joint multinational analysis projects.

The Mexican Family Life Survey will be one more of the Family Life Surveys.