Abstract
RationaleSocial desirability bias, which is the tendency to under-report socially, undesirable health behaviours, significantly distorts information on sensitive behaviours, gained from self-reports and prevents accurate estimation of the prevalence of those, behaviours. We contribute to a growing body of literature that seeks to assess the performance of the list experiment method to improve estimation of these sensitive health behaviours.MethodWe use a double-list experiment design in which respondents serve as the treatment group for one list and as the control group for the other list to estimate the prevalence of two sensitive health behaviours in different settings: condom use among 500 female sex workers in urban Senegal and physical intimate partner violence among 1700 partnered women in rural Burkina Faso. First, to assess whether the list experiment improves the accuracy of estimations of the prevalence of sensitive behaviours, we compare the prevalence rates estimated from self-reports with those elicited through the list experiment. Second, we test whether the prevalence rates of the sensitive behaviours obtained using the double-list design are similar, and we estimate the reduction in the standard errors obtained with this design. Finally, we compare the results obtained through another indirect elicitation method, the polling vote method.ResultsWe show that the list experiment method reduces misreporting by 17 percentage points for condom use and 16–20 percentage points for intimate partner violence. Exploiting the double-list experiment design, we also demonstrate that the prevalence estimates obtained through the use of the two lists are identical in the full sample and across sub-groups and that the double-list design reduces the standard errors by approximately 40% compared to the standard errors in the simple list design. Finally, we show that the list experiment method leads to a higher estimation of the prevalence of sensitive behaviours than the polling vote method.ConclusionThe study suggests that list experiments are an effective method to improve estimation of the prevalence of sensitive health behaviours.
Highlights
An important source of measurement error in surveys relates to re spondents’ reluctance to report socially sensitive behaviour
We showed that the factors associated with the level of condom use as estimated with the list experiment were in line with theoretical pre dictions
We were unable to test if the prevalence of the sensitive behaviours obtained with the list experiment was still unbi ased, and we found that the prevalence estimated with the list experi ment had high variance, which might be problematic in the presence of small samples (Blair et al, 2018)
Summary
An important source of measurement error in surveys relates to re spondents’ reluctance to report socially sensitive behaviour. This issue prevents researchers from obtaining valid information, which is needed to accurately estimate the prevalence of such behaviour. A commonly used method to reduce respondents’ hesitance to report sensitive behaviour is the list experiment technique. With this method, partici pants are randomly assigned to two groups (treatment or control) and are asked to report the number of statements that they agree with, without telling the researcher which ones. Comparing the average number of statements that respondents agree within the two groups provides an estimate of the prevalence of the sensitive behaviour in the treatment group
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