Archives: Publication

Over the past two decades, we have seen an explosion in research on the topic of women’s empowerment and its related dimensions, and yet much remains to be done in terms of clarifying conceptual pathways and best practices in measurement. This review traces the intellectual and historic context in which women’s status and empowerment in lower- and middle-income countries has been measured; the conceptual and operationalisation challenges in shaping research questions; the use of empirical measures and their connection to levels of social analysis, and the identification of emerging directions for future research. With the recognition that empowerment is as much a collective process as an individual one, the authors argue that a more integrative and multidisciplinary approach to empowerment is needed. This would necessitate incorporating an intersectional lens, the life course approach, and tapping into diverse sources of data that can cumulatively strengthen future research.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the consequent nationwide lockdown in India that began on March 25, 2020, caused a major disruption in the labour market, leading to the widespread loss of livelihoods and food insecurity. The findings from a telephonic survey of a representative sample of more than 3,000 households in the National Capital Region (NCR) also reveal a dramatic loss in earning capacity. The place of residence and occupation mediated the impact of the lockdown, with greater vulnerabilities witnessed amongst those engaged in informal employment, especially in urban areas. The Government rolled out a series of welfare measures in response to the widespread economic distress, with the provision of free foodgrains and cash transfers aimed at rehabilitating those who were the most affected. While the use of prior social registries enabled quick disbursement, our analysis points to the presence of unmet need, with such exclusion being exacerbated in the urban areas. The findings also reveal that the likelihood of receiving benefits increases with improvements in targeting at the local level and is vital for building social registries

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, telephone surveys have been used extensively for carrying out studies on health knowledge, morbidity, and mortality surveillance. In order to understand the extent of different sources of non-observation errors in telephone surveys, we compare the distributions of units covered in the sampling frame and survey respondents with those who were excluded from the sampling frame and survey nonrespondents, respectively. The distributions are compared with respect to key socio-economic and demographic characteristics, which are often associated with most health outcomes for two different study designs, viz., panel surveys and repeated cross-sectional surveys.