enumerator to skip the question. Indeed, we that ACASI, has the highest refusal rate out of the methods, though it is still low, at 0.84 percent for women. Table A16 shows refusal rates by question and method.

Additional indications that these results are robust are supported by the broadly similar patterns of misreporting by survey method that were observed over different countries, genders, violence types, perpetration and victimization questions, and list method designs.

# **5 Conclusion**

This paper provided some of the evidence that the prevalence of intimate partner violence varies substantially depending on the survey method used to measure it. Our results suggest that in some contexts, standard survey methods are likely to result in significant underestimates of the prevalence and welfare costs of IPV. The most widely used method, face-to-face interview, resulted in the lowest prevalence estimates, followed by the more private ACASI method. Finally, the list method, which allows respondents to report anonymously, resulted in the highest prevalence. In Rwanda, physical IPV rates were double, and in Nigeria, 39 percent greater when measured using the list method compared to the direct methods.

This paper also found that misreporting was systematic. The women who underreported when interviewed directly (compared to when interviewed with the list method) tended to be more vulnerable, not engaged in paid work, living in conservative communities, and more educated. These results demonstrate that misreporting was correlated with indicators that theory suggests are risk factors for IPV and with variables often targeted in women’s empowerment programs. Our results show non-trivial patterns of misreporting, such that gradients on some IPV-predictor relationships changed substantially, and some signs flipped, depending on the method used to measure IPV.

As other studies have found, direct measures of IPV can produce biased treatment estimates, for example, finding programs caused a reduction in IPV if measured face-to-face, but an increase if measured with the list experiment (Bulte and Lensink, 2019). Given the growing number of studies measuring program impacts on IPV, our results further highlight the risks of collecting measurement error-prone data for generating unbiased correlations and treatment effect estimates. Given that most IPV-related theory and prevention interventions are informed by face-to-face survey data, misreporting bias could have significant implications for our understanding of the prevalence of IPV, what causes it, and how to prevent it.

Our three-method comparison in Rwanda provides additional insights into potential reasons for misreporting. There were strikingly few differences between ACASI-measured and face-to-face-measured prevalence and IPV-predictor relationships. This suggests that women in Rwanda were no more comfortable reporting IPV with ACASI’s added privacy, yet the list method’s anonymity made many more women willing to report. This may suggest that on questions about illegal behaviors where respondents fear a risk of legal sanctions or repercussions from their answer, for example, in places where physical and sexual IPV are criminalized, then only anonymous survey methods may induce some respondents to report.<sup>32</sup>

> 32The similar face-to-face and ACASI reporting patterns may also be affected by the strict private interview setting in Rwanda. In a busier, more typical survey setting where privacy from curious onlookers and other household members is harder to enforce, we may have found that women would be even less willing to report IPV face-to-face, and ACASI may

20