Survey of Conflict Prevention and Cooperation 2004

For all four Central Asian countries in this survey, the sampling procedure is a three-stage stratified clustered one. Census data on the territorial dispersion of the population is used as the base to start the sampling methodology. The sampling procedure takes the total population of the country, considers geographic units within the country as either urban or rural, and then develops random procedures to select who to survey in three stages: first by randomly selected smaller geographic urban and units in each province (the primary sampling units or PSUs), second randomly chosing households within these units, and third, to randomly select which household member to interview in each household.

The sampling frame used to divide these four countries into smaller geographic units to randomly sample from differs slightly for each Central Asian country, based on differences in data availability on the population of the country and its dispersion. Subsequent sections explain the sampling methodology used and how this sampling frame differs in each country. Then all four countries have PSUs, random selection of households, and random sampling of individuals within households using the same methods.

Kyrgyzstan has of 7 provinces, with Bishkek city is considered as an eighth province for the survey. Each province is divided into several districts (rural areas) and city councils ("gorodskoy kenesh"). Overall Kyrgyzstan has 56 units (44 districts and 14 city councils). Districts incorporates villages, city councils incorporates cities (one for each city council) and villages (although these are not in all city councils). Villages are incorporated into rural districts ("ailny okmot"). Kyrgyzstan has 14 cities, 431 rural districts and 1,815 villages. The population of Kyrghyzstan was to 4,641,237 people, the urban population was 1,520,487 (33%), and the rural population 3,120,750 (67%) as of January, 1, 1998.

Several remote or inaccessible districts are excluded from the sampling frame. This category includes one district each in Naryn, Batken, Osh, Issyk-Kul, and three in Djalal-Abad. One larger district, Uzgen in Osh oblast, was excluded due to complicated interethnic and interreligious attitudes (147,183 inhabitants). In all, 14.99% of the rural population of the country was unfortunately left out of the sample frame, (467,853 people). This is 10.08% of the total population of Kyrgyzstan.

The sampling frame for Kyrgyzstan is constructed from a list of small territorial units that are the primary sampling units which are of two types: villages - rural settlements that are subordinated to rural councils ("ailny okmot") and is used as a unit for the sampling; and parts of large urban settlements - each city is divided into parts with populations between 3,991 and 5,364 inhabitants. As in Kazakhstan, such configuration of the sampling frame is required when there is only census data available for the population in urban settlements and there is no information available on the population in administrative-territorial urban units of smaller sizes (such as makhallas in Uzbekistan).

As in Kazakhstan, the sampling scheme for Kyrgyzstan has:

• proportionate stratification by population of provinces;
• for all provinces:
• proportionate stratification by urban/rural population within provinces;
• PPS-sampling of PSUs within urban/rural strata
• sequential random sampling of households (Secondary Sampling Units - SSUs) in selected PSUs;
• Kish grid based sampling of respondents within households.

Thus, the sampling is three-stage stratified clustered sampling, with all three stages conducted identically to the Kazakhstan example above. 58 PSUs in Kyrgyzstan are selected from the sampling frames, with the number of interviews varying between 11 and 30 people per PSU.

The sample distribution of main demographic characteristics can be compared with census data from 1999 (with 2000 data used for education section).