Household Characteristics and Settlement-Environment-Based Multidimensional Poverty in Gorontalo Province, Indonesia: A Multilevel Logistic Regression Analysis

Poverty assessment in Indonesian regions still relies mainly on a monetary line. Deprivations in settlement services, including household waste disposal, largely unobserved. Studies of the household determinants of multidimensional poverty seldom check whether reported associations survive once explanatory variables that overlap with index components are considered. This study examines whether household characteristics are associated with the probability of settlement-environment-based multidimensional poverty in Gorontalo Province. Data on 3,567 households came from the March 2025 National Socioeconomic Survey. Poverty status was identified with the Alkire-Foster method using ten indicators and a one-third cut-off, and its correlates were estimated with a two-level random-intercept logistic regression that accounts for the clustering of sampled households. The headcount ratio was 10.54 percent, and education contributed the largest share of the index. Household characteristics were jointly significant: the expenditure quintile showed a steep and stable gradient, and a higher dependency ratio raised the odds of poverty. A dimension-exclusion robustness test revealed that the apparent effects of the head's education and household size were largely artefacts of the schooling indicator. The novelty lies in a household waste indicator and a test separating substantive determinants from measurement artefacts.