Alvi, Muzna Fatima

Gupta, Shweta

Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela

Barooah, Prapti

Ringler, Claudia

Ensuring privacy of respondents in phone surveys is especially challenging compared to face-to-face interviews. While the use of phone surveys has become more common in development research, there is little information on how the conduct of phone surveys affects responses. Using phone survey data from India and Nepal, we test the impact of speakerphone use on bias in responses by women and men. We find that 65% of women respondents in India, and 61% of women and 59% of men respondents in Nepal had their phone on speaker during the survey. Speakerphone use is lower when women are matched with the same enumerators in the second round. Speaker use was associated with lower reported agency by women over their own income and the income of their spouse, while it is opposite for men. Our findings have important implication for the collection, design, and analysis of phone survey data.

Hello, can you hear me? Impact of speakerphones on phone survey responses

To understand the impact of COVID-19 on rural women, we designed a longitudinal panel study collecting five rounds of phone survey data with data drawn from a representative face-to-face survey in rural Senegal covering Fatick, Kaffrine, Kaolack, Kedougou, Kolda, Matam, Saint-Louis, Sedhiou, Tambacounda, and Ziguinchor regions. Due to low survey coverage of females in the first round, the second and third rounds surveyed both spouses and then randomly picked one male or female respondent per household to include in the study. For comparability we focus on findings from rounds 2-5. Figure 1 provides a detailed description of the study timeline and sample size covered in each round.

Assessing the impact of COVID-19 on rural women and men in Senegal

Raghunathan, Kalyani

Sehgal, Mrignyani

Group-based interventions are fast gaining traction in developing countries, often bolstering existing government service delivery systems. Such groups provide development programs with a means of extending their reach to households and individuals that might otherwise not seek public goods and services. However, the very reliance on the notion of “community” in these programs can constrain participation to those with a shared identity. In India, shared caste identity remains a central, and often controversial, element in many community-based programs. We explore the salience of caste identity with a field experiment conducted among women’s self-help groups in an eastern state of India. The experiment focused on the provision of information on nutrition, diet, and kitchen gardens. Specifically, we test the interplay between (a) the provision of information to self-help groups and (b) the caste identity of the information provider relative to the group’s caste identity, to assess what matters more –the message or the messenger. We randomize two treatments – an information treatment and ahomophily treatment – and measure the effect of these treatments on two outcomes: group members’willingness to contribute to a group-owned club good (a collectively managed kitchen garden), andindividual members’ retention of the information they received. We find that (1) information is veryimportant, (2) homophily, or shared caste identity with the information provider, is not that important,but (3) higher-caste information providers elicit greater willingness to contribute. These findings haveseveral implications for the design of public programs that rely on community-based organizations andagents as implementing partners and may thus be susceptible to identity issues, such as the exclusionof lower castes from certain occupations, public spaces or public goods.

Alvi, Muzna Fatima

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