Title: Longitudinal inconsistencies in women’s self-reports of lifetime experience of physical
and sexual IPV: Evidence from the MAISHA trial and follow-on study in North-western
Tanzania
Version: 0 Date: 26 Jan 2022
Reviewer's report:
Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper, which addresses an important, under-
researched subject. The paper is well-written and its findings on the prevalence of discrepant
reporting are particularly notable. The authors have done very well with offering possible
explanations and recommendations for how to measure violence, based on their findings. I
commend the authors on a job well done. The paper will make a valuable contribution to the
literature. I have three big-picture recommendations for the authors:
1)The paper focuses on physical and sexual IPV with very little attention to emotional IPV. There
is increasing recognition in the field of the importance of researching the impacts of emotional
IPV, which can even be more damaging than those of physical and sexual IPV. In the Results,
it becomes clear that the authors have access to data on lifetime experiences of emotional IPV
from this study. I am curious as to why the authors chose only to focus on discrepant reports
of physical and sexual but not emotional IPV. I believe that adding emotional IPV to this paper
would be very useful. If the authors believe this to be outside of the scope of the project, then I
would request that the authors more directly engage with emotional IPV in the text. For instance,
the authors find that those who experienced lifetime emotional IPV alongside physical IPV
were less likely to give discrepant reports, but this is not mentioned at all in the Discussion.
Furthermore, investigations into discrepant reporting of emotional IPV might be noted as an
area for future research.
2) This paper is framed under the assumption that IPV only involves women as the victims and
men as the perpetrators. This comes initially in the sentence in the Introduction, “The challenge
of collecting accurate self-reports of women’s experience or men’s perpetration of IPV are
considerable…” I would like to see a greater recognition of the fact that IPV can occur in other
types of partnerships/situations (i.e., women are not always the victims and men not always the
perpetrators).
3) Building on my first point, in the Discussion, I recommend adding clearer recommendations
for future research, beyond recommendations for how to measure IPV. Which areas do the
authors think are most important to examine in the future—e.g., Focusing on discrepant reports
of emotional IPV? Taking a broader look at factors which might relate to discrepant reporting,
like the use of different interviewers over time? Examining discrepant reports of perpetration
of violence rather than victimization? On the latter point, the authors acknowledge that their
findings cannot be generalized to men’s reports of perpetration, but investigation into discrepant
reports of perpetration broadly feels like an important area of future research—particularly given
that researchers at times rely on self-reported measures of perpetration as outcomes of trials
(e.g., see Jewkes, 2008, “Impact of Stepping Stones on Incidence of HIV and HSV-2 and sexual
behavior…”). Although not focused on IPV, I recommend consulting the following paper, which
also looked at the stability of reports of violence—in this case, violence perpetration by teachers
in schools: Merrill et all, 2020, “Measuring violence perpetration: Stability of teachers’ self-
reports before and after an anti-violence training in Cote d’Ivoire.” This could be useful where
the authors have tried to situate their findings in a broader context and might provide additional
considerations for areas of future research.
My remaining feedback is minor:
In table 1, consider using the exact wording of the initial part of the survey question rather than
summarizing what the question said (i.e. “Has your current or any other partner ever…?”).
I find it confusing that the Discussion references complete data for 78% of women, but by my
calculation the 301 included in the analysis represents 60% of the full sample; this percentage
should be added in line 227. If the authors wish to use 78% follow-up in the Discussion, then
they should clarify that this percentage is different from their analysis sample since it does not
account for the restriction to those reporting a past-year partner at all time-points.
In Table 2, it would be helpful to add p values to report any significant differences in the
baseline characteristics of the analysis sample versus the entire baseline sample. It appears that
the analysis sample was largely similar but it would help to see p values. Please add a sentence to
the Results (e.g., in line 233) noting the similarity of the characteristics between the two samples
(i.e., explaining Table 2 more directly). This is important to put in the Results particularly since
it is referenced in the Discussion (lines 401-403).
Table 3: Is there a way to incorporate the percent changes into this table? It is helpful that the
text references a 22% reduction and a 16% reduction, but it is difficult to see the reductions in
Table 3 as it is currently laid out.
Table 5a and 5b: Please adjust the headers for the columns of the table to make it more clear
that the middle two columns refer to physical violence and the right-two columns refer to sexual
violence.
Line 294: Remove “also”