Abstract
We elicit adolescent girls’ attitudes towards intimate partner violence and child marriage using purposefully collected data from rural Bangladesh. Alongside direct survey questions, we conduct list experiments to elicit true preferences for intimate partner violence and marriage before age 18. Responses to direct survey questions suggest that very few adolescent girls in the study accept the practises of intimate partner violence and child marriage (5% and 2%). However, our list experiments reveal significantly higher support for both intimate partner violence and child marriage (at 30% and 24%). We further investigate how numerous variables relate to preferences for egalitarian gender norms in rural Bangladesh.
Highlights
Gender disparities in outcomes favouring men within developing countries are generally larger than in the developed world (Jayachandran 2015)
Using a unique data set from Bangladesh, we confirm that subjective responses to sensitive direct questions under-estimate support for regressive social practices such as wife beating and child marriage
We find that exposure to a program that disseminated knowledge on gender empowerment led girls to hide their true support for domestic violence
Summary
Gender disparities in outcomes favouring men within developing countries are generally larger than in the developed world (Jayachandran 2015). Similar disparities often exist in attitudes towards gender equality (see, for instance, Asadullah and Wahhaj 2019; BorrellPorta et al 2019) Such attitudes, including attitudes supporting domestic violence and child marriage, can have important effects on behaviours, as well as play a prominent role in explaining observed gender disparities in outcomes. Despite the important role that attitudes play in explaining behaviours and outcomes, much of the existing empirical literature relies on survey-based direct questions eliciting attitudes that are likely to suffer from measurement error leading to biased estimates. Our study addresses this limitation by making use of list experiments that enable us to elicit attitudes regarding gender roles and behaviours in a better way
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