Methodological lessons from the pilot longitudinal survey on debt advice

Relatively little is known about the micro-level dynamics of over-indebtedness and associated social, health and other outcomes, and the role of formal debt advice in this process. To rectify this, a large-scale longitudinal survey has been proposed. However, such a survey would face several challenges, notably in sample recruitment and retention and in statistical identification of the effects of debt advice. A medium-scale pilot survey was carried out in order to test survey procedures and obtain estimates of key parameters that would determine the sample size and design of the main survey. This paper reports the findings of the pilot.