Primary Outcomes (end points)
We will collect data on short-term outcomes from three sources of information: administrative school data, self-reported survey data, and incentivized experimental data.
1. Survey data
i. Happiness
ii. Trust
iii. Locus of control
iv. Payment of school fees
2. School data
i. Attendance
ii. School fees
iii. Performance
3. Experimental data
i. Confidence
ii. Willingness to compete
iii. Willingness to take risk
Happiness will be measured on a scale from 1-5, where 1 is “very unhappy” and 5 is “very happy”
Trust will be measured on a scale from 1-4, based on the question “How much do you trust people in your village?”, where 1 is “Not at all” and 4 is “I trust them a lot”.
Locus of control is a dummy variable, which takes the value 1 if the respondent agreed more with statement A than statement B (and zero otherwise), where statement A is “The things that happen in your life are of your own doing” and statement B is “You don't have much control over what happens in life, or in the direction your life is headed”.
School fees is the response to the question: “For how many children do you pay school fees?”
Attendance is a dummy for whether the child was present at school at the time of the school visit, with the identity of the child being confirmed by the research team.
We will also ask questions about attendance, payment of various school fees, and the child’s performance based on school records. However, based on experience from a pilot in March 2015, we know that these records will sometimes be unavailable and incomplete. We shall therefore consider Attendance as the main school outcome.
Confidence is based on expected performance in a memory game. The participants were shown 10 items for 15 seconds, and then asked to name as many of these items as possible. They were also told that other villagers had conducted the same exercise. Before playing the same game one more time, they were asked (1) how many items they thought they would remember (0-10), and (2) how many they thought the other villagers on average had remembered (0-10). Confidence is measured as the difference between the first and the second question, where a person is said to be more confident the more positive is this difference.
Willingness to compete is a dummy taking the value one if the participants choose the competition rate, and zero if they choose the fixed rate, in the memory game, where the fixed rate is 1000 Uganda Shilling for each item remembered, and the competition rate is 2000 Uganda Shilling for each item remembered, but only if the number of items remembered was at least as high as the village average, and zero otherwise.
We will also ask a question about Willingness to take risk, is an un-incentivized measure, based on the response to the following statement: “I am willing to take risks, in general”, where the scale ranged from zero to 10, with zero indicating “No, I am completely unwilling to take risks, in general” and 10 “Yes, I am completely willing to take risks, in general”. Since this is un-incentivized, and we don’t have a strong prior as to the direction of the treatment effect, we do not consider this to be a main outcome variable.