Measuring Violence Against Women with Experimental Methods

Jorge Agüero and Veronica Frisancho

No 2020-14, Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics

Abstract: The prevalence of intimate partner violence is a central indicator of the Sustainable Development Goals for women's agency. However, measuring this indicator largely relies on self-reports that could suffer from severe misreporting if women face high costs of revealing their victim status. We study the degree of misreporting in surveys that have been identified as the best source of data, such as the widely used Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). Focusing on a sample of women in impoverished urban areas of Lima, Peru, we conduct an experiment that replicates direct measures from these surveys and compares them against list experiments, a method that provides greater privacy to respondents. We find no significant differences across direct and indirect methods in any of the seven acts of physical and sexual violence considered. This result largely persists when testing across sixteen different subgroups and accounting for multiple hypothesis testing.

Keywords: Women’s agency; intimate partner violence; measurement; list experiments; direct elicitation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 C83 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Journal Article: Measuring Violence against Women with Experimental Methods (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uct:uconnp:2020-14

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