The World Bank has launched a new initiative called "Listening to Georgia," as part of its global "Listening to" program. This initiative is supported financially by Sweden and aims to conduct monthly, nationally representative surveys in the South Caucasus region. The primary goal is to monitor dynamic situations with an emphasis on wellbeing and public perception.
According to the World Bank, the survey collects detailed information beyond typical household surveys. It aims to cover data gaps on health services, migration, employment, social protection, energy consumption and disruption issues, and public perceptions of basic and digital services. This approach allows for precise analyses and policy studies that measure not just poverty indicators but also multidimensional poverty and social exclusion.
The survey's structure involves an extensive face-to-face baseline survey followed by monthly phone interviews with a randomly chosen subset of participants from the baseline survey. The initial face-to-face survey was conducted between October 2024 and January 2025, covering more than 3,000 households using a two-stage stratified sampling design. Monthly phone interviews began in June 2025.
"Listening to Georgia" is led by the Poverty and Equity South Caucasus team of the World Bank in collaboration with other partners. The initiative aims to monitor citizen attitudes during ongoing structural reforms in Georgia, assess effects on households, and provide early warnings about potential roadblocks or unintended consequences of reform efforts.
The sampling design optimizes spatial allocation of household samples for valid representativeness at national levels across urban and rural areas. It follows protocols similar to those used in Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) type surveys.
The initiative's findings are expected to inform reform efforts directly by raising citizens' views' profile and enabling in-depth economic analysis. After completing the face-to-face baseline survey, interviewers regularly call a randomly selected panel of households over the phone for short interviews each month.
Sampling weights are used when computing representative statistics due to different probabilities of selection among population members. Two sets of weights are included: household weights and individual weights.
This note describes the sampling method used for the baseline survey of Listening to South Caucasus (L2SC) in Georgia. The design optimally allocates samples for acceptable precision and statistical efficiency using a stratified two-stage sampling design.