Special Collection 1 - Article 3 | Pages 77–108  

Are we measuring what we want to measure?: An analysis of individual consistency in survey response in rural Malawi

By Simona Bignami

This article is part of the Special Collection 1 "Social Interactions and HIV/AIDS in Rural Africa"

Abstract

The social context of survey interviews is likely to be important in survey measurement in developing countries, where respondents expect to benefit from participation. In the recent literature on survey measurement, however, there are few attempts to analyze the impact of the respondents’ social context on response error, and they tend to be limited to developed countries. This paper follows the narrow path traced by these attempts.
The opportunity for this study is offered by a set of 134 unplanned re-interviews collected during the fieldwork operations of a household panel survey in rural Malawi. Personal benefit was the main reason some respondents were willing to be re-interviewed, since the survey compensated them with an additional gift for the second interview. By comparing the answers to the first and second interview given by the re-interviewed respondents, this paper therefore assesses how the search for personal benefit (which captures some aspects of the respondents’ social context) biased the results.

Author's Affiliation

• Simona Bignami - Université de Montréal, Canada EMAIL

Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research

HIV/AIDS and time allocation in rural Malawi
Volume 24 - Article 27

An Assessment of the KDICP and MDICP Data Quality: Interviewer Effects, Question Reliability and Sample Attrition
Special Collection 1 - Article 2

Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research

Transitions to adulthood in men and women in rural Malawi in the 21st century using sequence analysis: Some evidence of delay
Volume 51 - Article 14    | Keywords: Africa, Health and Demographic Surveillance System, longitudinal analysis, Malawi, sequence analysis, transition to adulthood

Parental status homogeneity in social networks: The role of homophilous tie selection in Germany
Volume 48 - Article 2    | Keywords: fertility, homophily, network selection, social contagion, social interaction, social networks

A probabilistic model for analyzing summary birth history data
Volume 47 - Article 11    | Keywords: Bayesian hierarchical model, Brass method, Malawi, spatial smoothing, temporal smoothing

To what extent were life expectancy gains in South Africa attributable to declines in HIV/AIDS mortality from 2006 to 2017? A life table analysis of age-specific mortality
Volume 46 - Article 18    | Keywords: antiretroviral therapy, HIV/AIDS, life expectancy, South Africa

Women’s health decline following (some) unintended births: A prospective study
Volume 45 - Article 17    | Keywords: fertility, Malawi, panel studies, unintended fertility, women's health