Questionnaires
The 2014 KDHS used a household questionnaire, a questionnaire for women age 15-49, and a questionnaire for men age 15-54. These instruments were based on the model questionnaires developed for The DHS Program, the questionnaires used in the previous KDHS surveys, and the current information needs of Kenya. During the development of the questionnaires, input was sought from a variety of organisations that are expected to use the resulting data. A two-day workshop involving key stakeholders was held to discuss the questionnaire design.
Producing county-level estimates requires collecting data from a large number of households within each county, resulting in a considerable increase in the sample size from 9,936 households in the 2008-09 KDHS to 40,300 households in 2014. A survey of this magnitude introduces concerns related to data quality and overall management. To address these concerns, reduce the length of fieldwork, and limit interviewer and respondent fatigue, a decision was made to not implement the full questionnaire in every household and, in so doing, to collect only priority indicators at the county level. Stakeholders generated a list of these priority indicators. Short household and woman's questionnaires were then designed based on the full questionnaires; the short questionnaires contain the subset of questions from the full questionnaires required to measure the priority indicators at the county level.
Thus, a total of five questionnaires were used in the 2014 KDHS: (1) a full Household Questionnaire, (2) a short Household Questionnaire, (3) a full Woman's Questionnaire, (4) a short Woman's Questionnaire, and (5) a Man's Questionnaire. The 2014 KDHS sample was divided into halves. In one half, households were administered the full Household Questionnaire, the full Woman's Questionnaire, and the Man's Questionnaire. In the other half, households were administered the short Household Questionnaire and the short Woman's Questionnaire. Selection of these subsamples was done at the household level-within a cluster, one in every two households was selected for the full questionnaires, and the remaining households were selected for the short questionnaires.
It is important to note that the priority data collected in the short questionnaires were collected from all households and from all women since the short questionnaires were subsets of the full questionnaires. Therefore, data collected in both the full and the short questionnaires can produce estimates of indicators at the national, rural/urban, regional, and county levels. Data collected only in the full questionnaires (i.e., in one-half of households) can produce estimates at the national, rural/urban, and regional levels only. Data collected only in the full questionnaires are not recommended for estimation at the county level.
In this report, county-level data are tabulated for nearly all of the indicators for which they are available; county-level tables are not presented for indicators with insufficient cases for evaluation (less than 50 unweighted cases) within each county. In the case of indicators not collected at the county level, the tables include data at the regional level only.
The Household Questionnaire was used to list all of the usual members of the household and visitors who stayed in the household the night before the survey. One of the main purposes of the Household Questionnaire was to identify women and men who were eligible for the individual interview.
Some basic information was collected on the characteristics of each person listed, including age, sex, education, and relationship to the head of the household. The Household Questionnaire also collected information on characteristics of the household's dwelling unit, such as the source of water, type of toilet facilities, materials used for the floor and roof of the house, ownership of various durable goods, and ownership and use of mosquito nets. In addition, this questionnaire was used to record height and weight measurements of women age 15-49 and children under age 5.
The Woman's Questionnaires were used to collect information from women age 15-49. The full questionnaire covered the following topics (see Appendix E for a side-by-side comparison of topics included in the full and short questionnaires):
• Background characteristics (education, marital status, media exposure, etc.)
• Reproductive history
• Knowledge and use of family planning methods
• Fertility preferences
• Antenatal and delivery care
• Breastfeeding and infant feeding practices
• Vaccinations and childhood illnesses
• Marriage and sexual activity
• Women's work and husbands' background characteristics
• Childhood mortality
• Awareness and behaviour regarding HIV and other sexually transmitted infections
• Adult mortality, including maternal mortality
• Domestic violence
• Female circumcision
• Fistula
The Man's Questionnaire was administered to men age 15-54 living in every second household in the sample. The Man's Questionnaire collected information similar to that contained in the Woman's Questionnaire but was shorter because it did not contain questions on maternal and child health, nutrition, adult and maternal mortality, or experience of female circumcision or fistula. Both the Woman's and the Man's Questionnaires also included a series of questions to obtain information on respondents' experience of domestic violence. The domestic violence questions were administered in the subsample of households that received the full Household Questionnaire, the full Woman's Questionnaire, and the Man's Questionnaire. Additionally, the violence questions were administered to only one eligible individual, a woman or a man, per household. In households with more than one eligible individual, special procedures were followed in order to ensure that there was random selection of the respondent to be interviewed for the domestic violence module.
After finalisation of the questionnaires in English, they were translated into 16 other languages, namely Borana, Embu, Kalenjin, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kisii, Luhya, Luo, Maasai, Maragoli, Meru, Mijikenda, Pokot, Somali, Swahili, and Turkana. The translated questionnaires were pretested to detect any possible problems in questionnaire translation or flow, as well as to gauge the length of time required for interviews.