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

No 29584, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Women may under-report intimate partner violence (IPV) in surveys due to a variety of social and psychological factors. To understand if anonymized interviewing can allay this concern, we conduct a measurement experiment in rural Liberia and Malawi in which women were asked IPV questions via either self-interviewing (SI) or face-to-face interviewing (FTFI) with an enumerator. We find that about a third of women incorrectly answer basic screening questions over SI, and that it generates placebo effects on innocuous questions even for those who "pass" screening. Because the probability of responding "yes" to any specific IPV question is less than 50%, and that IPV is typically reported as an index (reporting yes to at least one question in a category of violence), such misunderstanding will tend to increase IPV reporting. In Malawi, we find that SI dramatically increases reported IPV, with the incidence of any type of IPV increasing by 13 percentage points on a base of 20%; in Liberia, we find an insignificant and modest increase of 4 percentage points on a base of 39%. Our results suggest SI may spuriously increase reported IPV rates.

JEL-codes: C93 I32 J16 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Working Paper: Private but Misunderstood ? Evidence on Measuring Intimate Partner Violence via Self-Interviewing in Rural Liberia and Malawi (2022)
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