Introduction
The aim of this paper is to critically examine and assess the attempts of two research studies in collecting evidence for the same development problem. Poverty is selected to study as the contemporary development issue in Sri Lanka and particularly poverty alleviations interventions of the government will be examined in this paper. However as mentioned the trust of this analysis will be limited to evaluating the methodological approaches of the studies.
Poverty and social safety net programs obviously have a close relationship. Social safety net (SSN) providing programs play vital role in reducing poverty, however implementing …show more content…
Hence, its faces and implications vary across individuals, communities, countries and regions. According to the Human Development report of United Nations in 1990, human development is the way to reduce poverty and reducing poverty is the way to the development (Human Development Report, 1990). Further, humanan development as an actor in economic growth should be properly managed to achieve the development and it cannot be merely achieved automatically (Bhanojirao, 1991). Amartya Sen explores poverty in terms of capability deprivation, therefore his attention was on capabilities of the people in eradicating poverty (Sen, 1983). In most cases of poverty alleviation attempts the concentration is drawn on assets and the ability of individuals of meeting assets, therefore poverty can be defined in terms of resources and needs. This paper draws on such a definition of poverty as the scope of poverty alleviation strategies studied in this exercise based on this principle. Accordingly Hengsdijk et al. (2005) explains that the extent of the ability of individuals or households to meet the needs or accumulate resources shows the level of poverty among them (Hengsdijk et al., …show more content…
One hundred seventy beneficiaries were selected on random basis from Rathnapura District of Sri Lanka. Rathnapura is one of the districts SDP has been implemented. A structured questionnaire was developed by the researcher to collect data in relation to poverty and its causes. The structured interviews were conducted in two occasions in 1995 and in 2009 to access the poverty levels prior to implementing SDP and after starting the implementation of.
As to Nichols (1991) a good understanding about the focus problem guides the design of a good structured survey. The range of possible answers should be known beforehand and listed as options to respondent to select appropriately. Further, pre-test or pilot survey should be trialled to select the best fit for the survey (ibid.). In structured interviews however there are three types of errors which can be attributed to the researcher administered process; one is related to the respondent behaviour (respondent may deliberately hide something), the other is the faulty of the memory of the respondent and the third kind of error related to the nature of the interview task, that is the frequency and communication problems at the time of performing the task (Fontana and Frey, 2000). Since this research collected data in two times