The Rwandan result challenges an alternative hypothesis about norms and IPV misreporting which posits that in villages with highly unequal gender norms, where IPV is normalized, women may feel more able to openly report IPV. If that were the case, we should have observed no difference between the coefficients for face-to-face-estimated IPV and the two more private or anonymous methods. Instead, in Rwanda at least, it appears that only the anonymous method, but not ACASI, made vulnerable women and women living in conservative communities comfortable enough to report IPV.

Greater marital relationship quality, measured using questions about satisfaction, empathy, and trust in marriage, was also associated with underreporting. In both countries, women who reported greater relationship quality were more likely to report IPV when interviewed using the list method than face-toface; the method differences were statistically significant on three out of the four IPV questions considered. A potential reason for women who report being in a more trusting, supportive relationship to underreport IPV when asked directly (but not indirectly) is because the direct question forces her to confront an uncomfortable truth about her marriage, or she may feel disloyal by directly admitting her husband has been violent. As Tables 4 and 5, and the associated figures A2 and A3 show, when IPV is measured using the list experiment, there is no relationship between IPV and relationship quality; it is only when using direct methods that we find a negative relationship between IPV and marital quality.

Several of these results highlight a potential measurement bias issue for the growing number of policies and interventions being assessed on their IPV impact. For example, an intervention that improves relationship quality- as several IPV prevention programs seek to do- may have no impact on actual IPV rates. However, it may lead to a reduction in a wife’s willingness to directly report IPV for the reasons discussed above. This would bias treatment effect estimates, suggesting a reduction in IPV that was, in fact, an artefact of the measurement method used. Alternatively, if a policy led to a worsening in community gender norms, IPV outcomes that were measured using direct methods may not detect a resulting actual increase in IPV if women are less willing to report it. In both of these cases, list experiment-measured IPV may be less prone to reporting bias and more likely to reflect true treatment effects.

We also examined whether characteristics that are proposed as causes or common correlates of IPV remain stable or at least with the same sign on the relationship, regardless of the method used, or whether the nature of the relationship depends on the measurement method. Across different indicators of women’s intrahousehold bargaining power, we find some evidence of systematic misreporting of IPV, though no clear pattern across different indicators. For example, in Rwanda, we find a strong relationship between employment and IPV misreporting. Results in Table A9 show that this reporting effect is driven by a large difference in reporting for women who are not engaged in paid employment. Similar to the norms and vulnerability results, this may suggest that women with the weakest bargaining power or outside options underreport the most when asked directly about their IPV experience. Again, the list experiment appears to make these women more willing to report IPV.

Potentially most concerning, we observe some opposite-signed relationships, where the sign on the relationship between IPV and the respondent’s characteristic is positive for one measurement method and negative for another method. In Rwanda, these variables include wife’s years of education, relationship quality, and engagement in paid work, and in Nigeria, wife’s vulnerability, literacy, and assets brought into the marriage. For example, in both Rwanda and Nigeria, there is suggestive evidence of a positive relationship between IPV and women’s education when IPV is measured directly, but a negative 17