Review of methodologies for counting street-connected children

Summary

This report reviews the methodologies that have been used for counting street-connected children around the world. The author, Dr Sarah J. E. Barry,  has reviewed a number of academic papers and reports by organisations involved in supporting street-connected children and critiqued the methods used. It should be noted that this is not a systematic review – considerable effort has gone into obtaining all of the relevant papers in the area, but some may have been missed.

The main methods that were found were census, observational headcount, respondent driven sampling and capture-recapture methods. Each method is introduced, some examples given of its use and a summary of the approach given. The report concludes with a general discussion and some conclusions/recommendations.

This report was commissioned by the Consortium for Street Children and was funded by the Royal Statistical Society Statisticians for Society initiative (www.rss.org.uk).