Private but Misunderstood? Evidence on Measuring Intimate Partner Violence via Self-Interviewing in Rural Liberia and Malawi

David Sungho Park, Shilpa Aggarwal, Dahyeon Jeong, Naresh Kumar, Jonathan Robinson and Alan Spearot

The World Bank Economic Review, 2025, vol. 39, issue 4, 907-923

Abstract: Women may underreport intimate partner violence (IPV) in surveys. In an experiment in rural Liberia and Malawi, women were asked IPV questions via self-interviewing (SI) or face-to-face interviewing. Many respondents appear to misunderstand questions in SI, and significant effects of SI were observed on innocuous placebo questions. Because the prevalence of IPV is typically well below 50 percent, such measurement error will tend to bias IPV reporting upwards. Indeed, the results show that SI increases reported incidence of IPV, but it cannot be ruled out that these increases are spurious.

Keywords: intimate partner violence (IPV); measurement; ACASI; sensitive behaviors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/wber/lhae040 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:wbecrv:v:39:y:2025:i:4:p:907-923.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The World Bank Economic Review is currently edited by Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik

More articles in The World Bank Economic Review from World Bank Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().