Advancing the Measurement of Violence in and Around Schools: Evidence from Malawi

Approximately one billion children worldwide report having experienced physical, emotional, or sexual violence, yet existing evidence suggests this figure substantially underestimates true prevalence, as individuals often avoid disclosing their experiences of violence. We study which survey methods yield more reliable measures of violence against children. We randomly assigned 6,000 children aged 8 to 12 years across 251 schools in Malawi to respond to a survey using face-to-face (F2F) interviews or audio computer-assisted self-interviews (ACASI), administered either at the child’s home or school. We find that ACASI, relative to F2F, substantially increases the disclosure of physical and emotional violence from peers and school staff, regardless of survey location. Disclosure of sexual violence more than doubles when using ACASI and when surveys are conducted at school rather than the child’s home. These effects are consistent with the greater privacy provided by ACASI and the additional reassurance offered by school settings, which provide physical spaces that may more strongly signal to respondents that their answers are unlikely to be overheard, reducing social and emotional barriers to disclosure. Our results are robust to multiple checks examining social desirability bias, lapses in attention, and misunderstanding of survey questions, and suggest that ACASI offers a cost-effective approach to reducing systematic measurement error in surveys on sensitive topics.