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Paper short abstract

Using an experiment with 3,000+ respondents, this paper tests a survivor-centered variation of WHO’s IPV survey instrument by reversing the ordering of the lifetime and past-6-month questions, and examines whether reducing double confirmation affects violence disclosure and respondent satisfaction.

Paper long abstract

This paper proposes a variation of the World Health Organization’s gold-standard protocols for collecting data on intimate partner violence (IPV), aimed at reducing respondents’ distress. Standard survey instruments first ask whether respondents have ever experienced a set of behavioral characterizations of violence and, if so, follow with a question on whether the episode occurred in the past six months. This strategy requires survivors to confirm potentially traumatic experiences twice. Instead, we propose an alternative sequencing that first asks about the experiences of violence in the past six months and only proceeds to the “ever” question if the respondent reports experiencing no violence in the past six months. This strategy preserves multiple reporting opportunities while minimizing repeated confirmation among victims and survivors. We randomly assign the two versions of the survey to a sample of over 3,000 respondents in rural Malawi and evaluate differences in reported lifetime and past six-month violence, as well as respondent survey satisfaction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental evidence on whether question sequencing can make data collection on intimate partner violence more survivor-centered and whether there are any data quality trade-offs.