TY - JOUR
T1 - Family planning for strangers
T2 - An experiment on the validity of reported contraceptive use
AU - Stecklov, Guy
AU - Weinreb, Alexander A.
AU - Sana, Mariano
AU - Anglewicz, Philip
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Stecklov et al.This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2015/8/31
Y1 - 2015/8/31
N2 - Sterilization levels reported in the Dominican Republic appear well above what we would normally expect given prevailing patterns in the region. We suspect that the use of strangers as interviewers - the normative approach in data collection in both developed and developing country settings - may be partly responsible for this result, and may underlie a long history of bias in family planning data. We present findings from a field experiment conducted in a Dominican town in 2010, where interviewer assignment was randomized by level of preexisting level of familiarity between interviewer and respondent. In our data, sterilization use is higher when the interviewer is an outsider, as opposed to someone known to the respondent or from the same community. In addition, high sterilization use is correlated with a propensity of respondents to present themselves in a positive light to interviewers. These results call into question the routine use of strangers and outsiders as interviewers in demographic and health surveys.
AB - Sterilization levels reported in the Dominican Republic appear well above what we would normally expect given prevailing patterns in the region. We suspect that the use of strangers as interviewers - the normative approach in data collection in both developed and developing country settings - may be partly responsible for this result, and may underlie a long history of bias in family planning data. We present findings from a field experiment conducted in a Dominican town in 2010, where interviewer assignment was randomized by level of preexisting level of familiarity between interviewer and respondent. In our data, sterilization use is higher when the interviewer is an outsider, as opposed to someone known to the respondent or from the same community. In addition, high sterilization use is correlated with a propensity of respondents to present themselves in a positive light to interviewers. These results call into question the routine use of strangers and outsiders as interviewers in demographic and health surveys.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0136972
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0136972
M3 - Article
C2 - 26322898
AN - SCOPUS:84943328517
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 10
JO - PloS one
JF - PloS one
IS - 8
M1 - 0136972
ER -