Female genital cutting (FGC) has major implications for women’s physical, sexual and psychological health, and eliminating the practice is a key target for public health policy-makers. To date one of the main barriers to achieving this has been an inability to infer privately-held views on FGC within communities where it is prevalent. As a sensitive (and often illegal) topic, people are anticipated to hide their true support for the practice when questioned directly. Here we use an indirect questioning method (unmatched count technique) to identify hidden support for FGC in a rural South Central Ethiopian community where the practice is common, but thought to be in decline. Employing a socio-demographic household survey of 1620 Arsi Oromo adults, which incorporated both direct and indirect direct response (unmatched count) techniques we compare directly-stated versus privately-held views in support of FGC, and individual variation in responses by age, gender and education and target female (daughters versus daughters-in-law). Both genders express low support for FGC when questioned directly, while indirect methods reveal substantially higher acceptance (of cutting both daughters and daughters-in-law). Educated adults (those who have attended school) are privately more supportive of the practice than they are prepared to admit openly to an interviewer, indicating that education may heighten secrecy rather than decrease support for FGC. Older individuals hold the strongest views in favour of FGC (particularly educated older males), but they are also more inclined to conceal their support for FGC when questioned directly. As these elders represent the most influential members of society, their hidden support for FGC may constitute a pivotal barrier to eliminating the practice in this community. Our results demonstrate the great potential for indirect questioning methods to advance knowledge and inform policy on culturally-sensitive topics like FGC; providing more reliable data and improving understanding of the “true” drivers of FGC.

Web surveys have replaced Face‐to‐Face and computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) as the main mode of data collection in most countries. This trend was reinforced as a consequence of COVID‐19 pandemic‐related restrictions. However, this mode still faces significant limitations in obtaining probability‐based samples of the general population. For this reason, most web surveys rely on nonprobability survey designs. Whereas probability‐based designs continue to be the gold standard in survey sampling, nonprobability web surveys may still prove useful in some situations. For instance, when small subpopulations are the group under study and probability sampling is unlikely to meet sample size requirements, complementing a small probability sample with a larger nonprobability one may improve the efficiency of the estimates. Nonprobability samples may also be designed as a mean for compensating for known biases in probability‐based web survey samples by purposely targeting respondent profiles that tend to be underrepresented in these surveys. This is the case in the Survey on the impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic in Spain (ESPACOV) that motivates this paper. In this paper, we propose a methodology for combining probability and nonprobability web‐based survey samples with the help of machine‐learning techniques. We then assess the efficiency of the resulting estimates by comparing them with other strategies that have been used before. Our simulation study and the application of the proposed estimation method to the second wave of the ESPACOV Survey allow us to conclude that this is the best option for reducing the biases observed in our data.

Extant scholarship on attitudes toward immigration and immigrants relies mostly on direct survey items. Thus, little is known about the scope of social desirability bias, and even less about its covariates. In this paper, we use probability-based mixed-modes panel data collected in the Southern Spanish region of Andalusia to estimate anti-immigrant sentiment with both the item-count technique, also known as list experiment, and a direct question. Based on these measures, we gauge the size of social desirability bias, compute predictor models for both estimators of anti-immigrant sentiment, and pinpoint covariates of bias. For most respondent profiles, the item-count technique produces higher estimates of anti-immigrant sentiment than the direct question, suggesting that self-presentational concerns are far more ubiquitous than previously assumed. However, we also find evidence that among people keen to position themselves as all-out xenophiles, social desirability pressures persist in the list-experiment: the full scope of anti-immigrant sentiment remains elusive even in non-obtrusive measurement.

Understanding how and why physical intimate partner violence (IPV) persists in high-risk communities has proven difficult. As IPV is both sensitive and illegal, people may be inclined to misreport their views and experiences. By embedding a list randomization experiment (LRE), which increases respondent privacy, in a survey of 809 adult Arsi Oromo men and women in rural south-central Ethiopia, we test the reliability of direct questioning survey methods (e.g., used in the Demographic and Health Surveys) for measuring attitudes that underpin the acceptability of IPV. Participants were randomly assigned versions of the survey in which they were asked either directly or indirectly about the acceptability of wife-beating. By comparing responses across these surveys, we identify the extent to which views are being misreported using direct questioning methods, as well as identifying the “true” predictors of continued support for wife-beating. Indirect questioning reveals that almost one third of the sample believe that wife-beating is acceptable. Adults (particularly men) who are less educated (50% endorsement). These individuals, however, are also more inclined to hide their approval when asked directly by an interviewer. That we find high but underreported support for wife-beating among some members of the community demonstrates a clear need to encourage a more open dialogue, to prevent violence toward women remaining undetected and thus unchanged. This finding also raises questions about the accuracy of traditional direct questioning for capturing information on IPV attitudes and norms. Of relevance to policy, we find that wife-beating is entirely absent only among adults with higher levels of education, living in households where decision making is shared between couples.