better understand the characteristics of those who misreport, we also compare mean IPV prevalence for respondents above and below the characteristic median (for numeric variable characteristics) or by their indicator variable characteristics.

# **4.2.2 Results: Respondent characteristics predict misreporting**

We analyze misreporting by respondent characteristics that fall into three overlapping categories. These characteristics include: 1) those most likely to motivate respondents to misreport (to understand why people misreport IPV); 2) variables typically targeted in IPV prevention interventions (to evaluate risks of estimating biased treatment effects); and 3) characteristics frequently cited as IPV risk factors (to assess potential challenges to IPV-related theory that has been informed by analysis of face-to-face survey data). The first two categories of characteristics include perceptions of village gender norms; poverty and vulnerability; marital relationship quality; and personal gender attitudes. Additional IPV risk factors considered include women’s education and literacy, age, labor force participation and other indicators of women’s bargaining power, where theory and empirical evidence are mixed on the relationship with IPV (Bobonis, González-Brenes and Castro, 2013; Buller et al., 2018; Erten and Keskin, 2018; Heise and Kotsadam, 2015; Haushofer et al., 2019; Eswaran and Malhotra, 2011).

Tables 4 and 5 show the relationships between IPV and respondent characteristics by survey method. The first 3 (6) columns show the relevant regression coefficient of interest for Rwanda (Nigeria), and the last 3 columns show the results of chi-squared tests of the coefficient differences between pairs of methods. Each coefficient shown in the tables was estimated in a separate regression. These tables show several significant differences in coefficients across the methods, implying that a number of characteristics are associated with systematic misreporting of IPV. These results are also shown graphically in Figures A2 and A3. We also show the differences in mean IPV prevalence for respondents above and below the median of the characteristic in Tables A9 and A10 and graphically in Figures A4 and A5.

This subsection presents the results of descriptive analysis and as such, usual caution should be applied when interpreting results given that omitted variables or other sources of bias may be driving observed correlations. Given this is exploratory analysis only, we do not adjust the p-values of tests of equivalence for multiple hypothesis testing.<sup>28</sup> These results show that in both countries, vulnerable women report IPV at lower rates when they are asked about their experience using direct methods than when interviewed using the list method. Specifically, in Rwanda, a one standard deviation increase in a woman’s vulnerability index was associated with a 6 percentage point increase in reported experience of IPV when violence was measured face-toface, a 5 percentage point increase when measured using ACASI, and a 23 percentage point increase when measured using the list method. In Nigeria, vulnerable women were also more likely to report physical IPV under the list method than face-to-face. For emotional and sexual IPV, the same pattern existed but the differences were not statistically significant. Table A9 shows that, in Rwanda, as we might expect, the difference between IPV reporting when it was measured using the list and direct methods was driven

> 28For conceptually linked variables (for example, questions about relationship quality such as trust and empathy in the marriage), we generated weighted standardized summary indices (Anderson, 2008) to minimize the false discovery rate. For other indicators of interest where there is less theoretical coherence between the variables, we report coefficients on the raw variable. For instance, it is not clear that the following indicators of women’s bargaining power are measures of the same construct, nor whether they would each induce a respondent to underreport IPV more or less: education, asset ownership, age, marital status, and engagement in paid employment.

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