Analysis of the Mobile Phone Survey of the Haitian Population

• Activity Number: 68
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, July 29, 2012 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: Statistics Without Borders
• Author(s): Ryung Kim*+
• Companies: Albert Einstein College of Medicine
• Keywords: Statistics without Borders ; Haiti ; earthquake ; random digit dial

Abstract

Statistics-Without-Borders provided technical assistance to SciMetrica which conducted a survey in June 2010 of the economic impact of the January 2010 Haitian earthquake using a random digit dial (RDD) sample of mobile phone numbers. Based on the survey, Ashley, Fritz Scheuren (2011) discussed the potential of mobile phone interviews in a natural disaster setting and discussed about related methodological directions, including the computation of survey weights. We summarize the survey to report the magnitude of economic impact: 61.4% (69% in Port-au-Prince and 50.5% in other areas) of the residency buildings were partially or totally destroyed in the earthquake. Among those relocated, 28.4% of the adults were still living in tent or cabin. Only 5% relocated to a house more than one hour away from their original residence. Overall 49.4% of the households experienced the change in its members. Among such households, on average, 1.9 people (1.0 child) who had shared their cooking pot on January 12th were not living together anymore. In the early analysis, we are finding that the disintegration of family is more severe among families whose head had less than high school education.