Measuring Violence against Women with Experimental Methods

Intimate partner violence prevalence is a central indicator of the Sustainable Development Goals for women’s agency. However, measuring its progress largely relies on self-reports that could suffer from misreporting. Focusing on a sample in impoverished urban areas in Peru, we replicate direct measures from the widely used Demographic and Health Surveys and compare them against list experiments, a method providing greater privacy to women. We find no significant differences across direct and indirect methods in terms of the report of physical and sexual violence. This result largely persists when testing across 16 different subgroups and accounting for multiple-hypothesis testing.