Climate Change Adaptation amid Layered Vulnerabilities: Mapping Smallholder Farmers’ Adaptive Capacities and Strategy Patterns across Socio-Ecological Gradients in Post-Conflict Acholi, Northern Uganda
Description
This dataset contains household survey data from the rural Acholi sub-region, Northern Uganda, collected in 2025 to analyze the dynamics of smallholder farmers’ adaptation to climate change and layered vulnerabilities in the post-conflict context. It includes variables on demographic, socioeconomic, environmental, political, and institutional factors influencing livelihoods and adaptation, including perceived challenges, their frequency and severity, selected adaptation strategies, their success, and barriers to implementation. It also included eleven mental health screening questions based on the DSM-5 PTSD psychometric assessment guide (Prins, Bovin, & Smolenski, 2016), addressing five dimensions: intrusive memories, avoidance, negative mood or thoughts, hypervigilance, and sleep or concentration problems. Further, four sets of questions were also included to assess households’ exposure to conflict. Conflict exposure-probing questions focused on the family level, capturing variables such as displacement, internment in camps, war-related asset loss, and close relatives’ injury or death from the historical civil war, following guides by Brück, Justino, Verwimp, Tedesco, and Avdeenko (2013). In the survey tool, most questions were closed-ended with multiple-response options, including “other.” The instrument was pre-tested on 163 households in Keyo village, Amuru district, and subsequently revised to resolve ambiguities. The data are provided in a .RData format alongside detailed R scripts and can be used to reproduce the study or for related research.
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Data collection was conducted in three phases. In the first phase, an ethnographic study, comprising six focus group discussions and ten key informant interviews (each lasting 1.5 hours), informed the design of the survey instrument. In the second phase, nine trained enumerators administered the survey to 1,085 households through face-to-face interviews, each lasting approximately two hours. In the third phase, qualitative data were gathered via eight gender- and age-segregated focus group discussions and twelve semi-structured interviews with male and female farmers, of varying age groups, to explore anomalies and contradictions in the quantitative data, employing a feminist political ecology lens to understand how gendered social relations, power relations, and inequalities shape people’s adaptive responses.