ArticleBMJ open2021
Interviewer effects on abortion reporting: a multilevel analysis of household survey responses in Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria and Rajasthan, India.
Article in BMJ open, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 0 citations in OpenAlex.
- Stage-Specific Psychological Distress, Coping, and Social Support among Women Undergoing Pregnancy Termination in Rwanda: A Cross-Sectional Comparative Study.Rwanda journal of medicine and health sciences · 2025Article
- Assessing induced abortion underreporting in restrictive settings using prospective morbidity surveys from Kenya, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Interviewer Effects on the Measurement of Physical Performance in a Cross-National Biosocial Survey.Journal of survey statistics and methodology · 2024Article
- The effect of interviewer-respondent age difference on the reporting of sexual activity in the Demographic and Health Surveys: Analysis of data from 21 countries.Journal of global health · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesThe analysis aimed to assess the scale of interviewer effects on abortion survey responses, to compare interviewer effects between different question wordings and between direct and indirect approaches, and to identify interviewer and interview characteristics that explain interviewer effects on abortion reporting.
setting2018 Performance Monitoring for Action nationally representative household surveys from Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria and Rajasthan, India.
participantsSurvey data from 20 016 interviews with reproductive age (15-49) women, selected using multistage stratified cluster sampling. Data from self-administered interviewer surveys and from a sample of health service delivery points that serve the female survey participants were also included. PRIMARY OUTCOME MEASURES: Outcomes were the respondent's own experience of ever 'removing a pregnancy', their closest confidante's experience of pregnancy removal and the respondent's own experience of period regulation.
resultsSubstantial interviewer effects were observed, ranging from 7% in Côte d'Ivoire to 24% in Nigeria for pregnancy removal. Interviewer effects for survey questions that were designed to ask about abortion in a less stigmatising way were either similar to (9%-26% for confidante-reporting) or higher than (17%-32% for a question about period regulation) the pregnancy removal question. Interviewer and interview characteristics associated with abortion reporting included respondent-interviewer familiarity, the language of interview and the interviewer's comfort asking questions about abortion.
conclusionThis study highlights that questions designed to be less stigmatising may increase interviewer effects due to lower comprehension among respondents. Further work is needed to assess question wordings for different contexts. Selecting and training interviewers to ensure comfort asking questions about abortion is important for reproductive health surveys. Challenges for the use of 'insider' interviewers and the management of surveys in countries with high linguistic diversity are also identified.
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