ArticleStudies in family planning2021
An Assessment of Third-Party Reporting of Close Ties to Measure Sensitive Behaviors: The Confidante Method to Measure Abortion Incidence in Ethiopia and Uganda.
Article in Studies in family planning, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Social Network-Based Induced Abortion Incidence Estimation in Burkina Faso: Examining the Impact of the Network Generating Question.Studies in family planning · 2022Trial
- A Bayesian Framework to Account for Misclassification Error and Uncertainty in the Estimation of Abortion Prevalence.Studies in family planning · 2026Article
- Article
- Assessing induced abortion underreporting in restrictive settings using prospective morbidity surveys from Kenya, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Addressing Abortion Underreporting in Surveys with the List Experiment: Lifetime and Five-Year Abortion Incidence with Multivariate Estimation of Socio-demographic Associations in two U.S. States.Population research and policy review · 2025Article
- Estimating the Social Visibility of Abortions in Uganda and Ethiopia Using the Game of Contacts.Studies in family planning · 2024Article
- Direct and indirect estimation of adolescent sexual intercourse and contraceptive use in Rajasthan India: an application of the best friend methodology.BMC women's health · 2024Article
- Estimating induced abortion incidence and the use of non-recommended abortion methods and sources in two provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Kinshasa and Kongo Central) in 2021: results from population-based, cross-sectional surveys of reproductive-aged women.Sexual and reproductive health matters · 2023Article
- Abortion incidence and safety in Niger in 2021: Findings from a nationally representative cross-sectional survey of reproductive-aged women using direct and indirect measurement approaches.PLOS global public health · 2023Article
- Self-reported abortion experiences in Ethiopia and Uganda, new evidence from cross-sectional community-based surveys.PLOS global public health · 2023Article
- Describing the safety of abortion at the population level using network-based survey approaches.Reproductive health · 2022Article
- An investigation of the impact of the Global Gag Rule on women's sexual and reproductive health outcomes in Uganda: a difference-in-differences analysis.Sexual and reproductive health matters · 2022Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Indirect estimation techniques are important tools for measuring sensitive and stigmatized behaviors. This includes third-party reporting methods, which have become increasingly common in the field of abortion measurement, where direct survey approaches notoriously lead to underreporting. This paper provides the first in-depth assessment of one of the most widely used of these techniques in the field of abortion measurement: the confidante method. We outline six key assumptions behind the confidante method and describe how violations of these assumptions can bias resulting estimates. Using data from modules added to the performance monitoring for action surveys in Uganda and Ethiopia in 2018, we compute one-year abortion incidence estimates using the confidante method. We also perform a validation check, using the method to estimate intrauterine device /implant use. Our results revealed implementation problems in both settings. Several of the method's foundational assumptions were violated, and efforts to adjust for these violations either failed or only partially addressed the resulting bias. Our validation check also failed, resulting in a gross overestimate of intrauterine device/implant use. These results have implications more broadly for the potential biases that can be introduced in using third-party reporting of close ties to measure other sensitive or stigmatized behaviors.
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