@article{25aee03ab1264901a308e06ba8e711ad,
title = "Empowering women or increasing response bias? Experimental evidence from Congo",
abstract = "Women's empowerment interventions are an important component of many development programs; surveys are a popular tool to measure how such programs affect gender-related attitudes. We consider how differences in gender response bias between the treatment and control groups complicate the use of attitudinal questions to evaluate women's empowerment interventions. We examine data from two experiments: a randomized development program aimed to empower women in 1,250 Congolese villages and a follow-up survey experiment. After demonstrating strong response biases in gender-related questions as a function of interviewer gender, we show that these biases vary as a function of program treatment status. These findings mean that the estimated average treatment effects of women's empowerment programs are sensitive to both the gender composition of the respondent sample as well as the interviewer pool. We conclude with lessons for survey implementation and pre-analysis plans.",
keywords = "Experiment, Gender, Interviewer effects, Survey design",
author = "Harris, {J. Andrew} and {van der Windt}, Peter",
note = "Funding Information: Thanks to Claire Adida, Amanda Clayton, Justine Davis, Jocelyn Kelly, Ragnhild Nordas, Patrick Milabyo, Jeroen Cuvelier, and Neelanjan Sircar, as well as seminar participants at the University of Essex. We thank Laura Moreno and Ruilin Lai for research assistance. The data for this paper were collected by Van der Windt in collaboration with Macartan Humphreys and Raul Sanchez de la Sierra, the IRC, CARE International, and the universities of Bukavu and Lubumbashi. Instruments and data are publicly available online via https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/BSASJR. Van der Windt also gratefully recognizes financial support by the Center of Behavioral Institutional Design and Tamkeen under the NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute Award CG005. Funding Information: Thanks to Claire Adida, Amanda Clayton, Justine Davis, Jocelyn Kelly, Ragnhild Nordas, Patrick Milabyo, Jeroen Cuvelier, and Neelanjan Sircar, as well as seminar participants at the University of Essex. We thank Laura Moreno and Ruilin Lai for research assistance. The data for this paper were collected by Van der Windt in collaboration with Macartan Humphreys and Raul Sanchez de la Sierra, the IRC, CARE International, and the universities of Bukavu and Lubumbashi. Instruments and data are publicly available online via https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/BSASJR . Van der Windt also gratefully recognizes financial support by the Center of Behavioral Institutional Design and Tamkeen under the NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute Award CG005 . Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2023 The Authors",
year = "2023",
month = sep,
doi = "10.1016/j.jdeveco.2023.103097",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "164",
journal = "Journal of Development Economics",
issn = "0304-3878",
publisher = "Elsevier",
}