Methodological Strategies for Investigating Hard-To-Reach Populations: Essays from Tanzania, Nepal, And Sierra Leone

Abstract

I present three essays on populations in developing countries that can be considered hidden or hard-to-reach: children 12-to-17 years old, siblings of persons with disabilities, and pregnant women during an epidemic. These populations may not be hidden or hard-to-reach in a traditional sense; they are simply accidently overlooked or, insidiously, purposefully ignored by academics and policy makers alike. In each chapter, I highlight reasons these populations have been overlooked by policy makers and document the value of demographic data about these populations that are “hidden in plain sight.” I suggest methodologies by which quantification and data collection can improve policy. In the first essay, I explore the social and logistical challenges of including children in survey research in Tanzania and Nepal. In the second essay, I focus on the hidden population of siblings of children with disabilities, using census data from Tanzania to identify and to establish descriptive estimates of the number of children living with siblings with disabilities. The final essay explores the effects of the 2014-2016 West African Ebola epidemic on the fertility of women in Sierra Leone. In each of the three essays of this dissertation, I balance the influence of social constructs with objective and well-founded statistical analysis to show that demography remains necessary for policy making despite the social and theoretical influences. The focus on populations in developing countries – specifically Tanzania, Nepal, and Sierra Leone – promotes further policy attention at the intersection of childhood, health, and family.