Abstract
Sterilization levels reported in the Dominican Republic appear well above what we would normally expect given prevailing patterns in the region. We suspect that the use of strangers as interviewers—the normative approach in data collection in both developed and developing country settings—may be partly responsible for this result, and may underlie a long history of bias in family planning data. We present findings from a field experiment conducted in a Dominican town in 2010, where interviewer assignment was randomized by level of preexisting level of familiarity between interviewer and respondent. In our data, sterilization use is higher when the interviewer is an outsider, as opposed to someone known to the respondent or from the same community. In addition, high sterilization use is correlated with a propensity of respondents to present themselves in a positive light to interviewers. These results call into question the routine use of strangers and outsiders as interviewers in demographic and health surveys.
Highlights
The Dominican Republic (DR) has the highest levels of female sterilization in Latin America
Given that the prevalence of non-permanent methods increased from 8 to 26 percent of women over the same period, this means that since the mid1980s, female sterilization has been the dominant method of choice for some two-thirds of current users of family planning
The central question that we address in this paper is whether these estimates of sterilization in the Dominican Republic (DR), and possibly contraceptive prevalence in the DR more generally, are exaggerated
Summary
We present findings from a field experiment conducted in a Dominican town in 2010, where interviewer assignment was randomized by level of preexisting level of familiarity between interviewer and respondent. High sterilization use is correlated with a propensity of respondents to present themselves in a positive light to interviewers. These results call into question the routine use of strangers and outsiders as interviewers in demographic and health surveys. Data Availability Statement: Data files for research replication are included as Supporting Information.
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