# **1. Introduction**

Accurate estimates of men’s and women’s employment are at the heart of understanding sources of productivity and economic growth and designing well-targeted, gender-sensitive labor policies. Country employment surveys, spanning labor force surveys and labor modules in multi-topic household surveys, are usually structured to ask working-age individuals to report the incidence of and time allocation to a range of employment-related activities over different reference periods, for example over the last week or 12 months. The common “business-as-usual” approach in these surveys, however, can involve interviewing respondents in group settings; proxy respondents reporting on behalf of individuals that are not available for interviews; and other issues affected by survey time constraints, including lack of follow-up questions linked to difficult-to-measure or seasonal activities, as well as intra-household roles in enterprises. All of these variations can potentially create errors in reporting employment, particularly when questions involve longer recall periods, or for types of employment that are more difficult to measure, including seasonal/informal work. A key question, as a result, is whether individual interviews with respondents — focusing on self-reporting and one-on-one (as opposed to group) settings — have a significant effect on reporting of employment over the standard practice.

This study aims to answer this question by leveraging two national surveys that were implemented concurrently by the Malawi National Statistical Office with different approaches to respondent selection in collecting individual-disaggregated survey data, including on employment — and that allow us to compare the data obtained under the business-as-usual approach (the Fourth Integrated Household Survey (IHS4) 2016/17) versus individual interviews that are conducted in private (the Integrated Household Panel Survey (IHPS) 2016). As compared to individual interviews conducted in the IHPS, our findings show that the business-as-usual approach leads to significant underreporting of employment in livestock-related activities and household non-farm enterprises (in management and worker capacity) – with stronger effects for women and under a recall period of 12 months, as opposed to 7 days. The analysis also reveals underreporting in wage employment among men under the business-as-usual approach. Looking at how the choice of survey approach affects time allocation to employment, we find that most differences arise within agriculture, with the business-as-usual approach underestimating weekly hours spent by men and women in livestock activities as well as weekly hours devoted by men to crop agriculture. We find that the higher incidence of proxy reporting in the IHS4 is likely a significant contributor of underreporting, as well as potential difficulties, given less time spent with enumerators, that the IHS4 respondents may have faced in interpreting and reporting on concepts related to businesses or enterprises (as evidenced by greater discrepancies in reporting in the IHS4 across the labor and non-farm enterprise modules). Finally, household wealth is significantly associated with the extent of reporting differences across the individual interview and business-as-usual approaches.

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