Violent conflict is a key obstacle to overall economic development and specifically to human development. Conflicts vary greatly in their nature – hence the impacts of conflicts on people also vary greatly. If socioeconomic research on conflict has demonstrated one thing, it is that the circumstances of conflict matter greatly for policies designed to end and overcome the legacies of conflict.
Reconstruction policies in particular must build on local conflict legacies, taking into consideration how people were affected by war and violence, for example through death, displacement, disability, fear, asset loss or market breakdown.
In essence, each person may experience a conflict differently, leading to different types of conflict exposure even within families or villages. Conflict exposure may vary by gender, political view, socioeconomic status, or mere bad luck. Capturing how people experience and are exposed to such conflict dynamics is the aim of this sourcebook. Specifically, the objective of this conflict survey sourcebook is to increase the capacity of researchers and policymakers to identify consistently, comparatively, and across time, the ways in which violent conflict affects individuals, households and communities along key social and economic dimensions.
The sourcebook extensively reviews current practices and datasets used in micro-level surveys of conflict-affected populations. We review existing conflict- and violence-related questionnaires, with a special focus on the World Bank’s Living Standard Measurement Study (LSMS) surveys. We suggest improvements to questionnaires in order to adapt them to conflict contexts. In addition, we discuss common methodological challenges faced while working in conflict-affected areas, such as operationalizing a definition of conflict, using the appropriate unit of analysis, timing the survey, dealing with common biases, and conducting surveys in an ethical manner.
We develop and discuss a conflict exposure module: a generic household survey module that can be readily adapted for future socioeconomic surveys implemented in conflict-affected areas. In the discussion of our module, we make special reference to the direct and indirect channels by which conflict may affect respondents’ behavior and welfare. Our module builds on the extensive experience of the research team and others in survey design and implementation in conflict-affected areas. We provide suggestions to practitioners on designing questions to be sensitive to the timing of events and the intensity of individual experiences of violence. We suggest how answer categories may incorporate conflict scenarios that link directly to welfare and behavioral outcomes. We provide further solutions for how surveys can be comprehensive—covering demographics, economic welfare, conflict activities, health and harm, displacement, education, and perceptions of security, life satisfaction and expectations – in a conflict-sensitive manner.
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