Reliability and validity of multidimensional poverty index with poverty scorecard in measuring household poverty in rural India.

Abstract

Poverty disempowers people in maintaining, promoting and restoring good health. Simple poverty scorecards (SPS) are commonly used to measure socio-economic status in public health research. Recently, Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) has become popular in line with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator target 1.2. While both SPS and MPI have good potential for measuring poverty in rural India, they have not been compared for reliability. Therefore, this research aims to measure the association of MPI with SPS in rural Aligarh as well as to correlate their scores. Further, the research also aims to determine the validity of MPI with SPS in measuring poverty. A cross-sectional study was conducted among rural households in rural areas of Aligarh district in the most populated Indian state of Uttar Pradesh from January to July, 2023. While strongly associated, the SPS identified more households as poor (33.8%) when compared to MPI (25.4%) among the 299 randomly selected households in the sample. MPI based scores were correlated with SPS scores with moderate strength (ρ = 0.6) but with poor concordance (τ = 0.4). The MPI has a poorer validity in detecting poverty with a sensitivity of 46.4% and in high poverty scenarios, the predictive values are also poorer.