Dear Faruque,

It sounds like you have made a good start. The next thing I would recommend is to consider how you should measure use of microfinance, income, food security and degree of women empowerment. This will lead you into specific question formulation. These will either be single answer or multiple answer and will have an associated data type.

You will then need to decide whether to analyse each of the questions individually or whether you want to try to treat a group of questions as relating to the same thing, known as reliability analysis. If successful, this would create variables of a data type known as scale.

The actual analysis itself will depend upon the data types of the variables that you use. It sounds like microfinance might be your independent variable. If it simply separates the data into two groups then you could use individual tests with the other variables, such as t-tests, Mann-Whitney U and chi-squared. If you wish to look at the way it affects all the other variables at the same time then you might be able to use MANOVA.

Dear Peter,

Thank you very much for your kind reply. I am thinking to compare mfi-non borrowers (control group) with mfi- borrowers ( treatment group) for a certain period of time to see if microfinance have any the effect on their income, food security and empowerment or not. I have made a draft questionnaire and i would be very grateful if you could take a look at the questionnaire and give me some advice.

Thank you so much for your precious time.

Dear Faruque, 

You could also turn your questionnaire into an interview schedule and conduct conversational face to face interviews with micro-finance small business owners. Or your female co-researchers could collect the data for you and together your research team could  analyse the text for the questions you have. 

An ethnographic approach involving narrative analysis as well perhaps would help you cover the several questions including the empowerment dimension you are interested in with more authenticity.  If you have any colleagues in your university with anthropological ethnographic research skills they could help you explore the possibilities of this method more with you. 

Overall your inquiry would benefit from a mixed methods approach (qualitative and quantitative) to fully cover your subject area.  I would suggest you read more about this, talk to colleagues who are methods specialists in both qualitative and quantitative research and you will be more empowered to decide for yourself what would be appropriate for your study.

Good luck with the research.

Thank you so much Julia, for your kind suggestions. 

Dear Faruque,

I cannot help you directly with your questionnaire but you might find it worthwhile to check out this incredibly useful website: https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#_chart-type=bubbles

It can give you a jumpstart on your research question, since you can play around with correlations of all sorts, including income and food security.

I have been using it thouroughly throughout my time a university.

All the best

Marcel

Thank you so much Marcel.