Method of selecting objects for social research

Abstract

Socio-economic research of rural areas due to their natural and economic heterogeneity, combined
with the territorial dispersion of the population in the conditions of Northern Kazakhstan, requires the
involvement of a sufficiently large amount of resources. This fact raises the question of selecting objects for
study. Moreover, the selection process is complicatedby the need to take into account several criteria. The article
deals with the problem of multi-criteria selection of potentially depressed rural areas. In order to develop and
implement adequate and effective socio-economic programs in rural areas, it is necessary to determine the
location of the most acute manifestation of the depression and poverty.
The main source of income for rural residents of Northern Kazakhstan is agricultural entrepreneurship.
Therefore, the number of rural population, the proportion of young people aged 16-29 years, and the volume
of agricultural production were taken as criteria. The calculations were based on official data on the socioeconomic characteristics of rural areas of Akmola region for period from 2014 to 2020. Well-known methods based on the calculation of normalized distances of criteria values to the corresponding «reference» values,
as well as the so-called analytical hierarchical process method, were critically analyzed. A calculation scheme
which is a symbiosis of these methods in the application to the ranking and selection of socio-economic objects is
proposed. The developed chain of methodological techniques and procedures allows us to take into account the
objective and subjective components of the selection problem as effectively as possible and thereby strengthen
the scientific validity of the selection of pilot objects for social research, the author concludes.