Time-of-day effects on disclosure of intimate partner violence

Efforts to measure and advance research on intimate partner violence (IPV) often rely on the analysis of data collected from confidential household surveys. Yet, even in confidential settings, women may underreport IPV. I present evidence that, in Sub-Saharan Africa, women with husbands who consume alcohol are 6.4 percentage points less likely to self-report severe physical and/or sexual IPV during evening surveys than during morning surveys. This finding occurs because the expected marginal costs of IPV reporting increase over the day with husbands’ alcohol consumption. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that, even if only 10% of interviews conducted by nationally representative IPV survey efforts occur during the evening, time-of-day effects exclude over 314,496 women from estimates of the most severe forms of IPV across Sub-Saharan Africa.