The Impact of Repeat HIV Testing on Risky Sexual Behavior: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Malawi.

A significant proportion of HIV-positive adults in sub-Saharan Africa are in serodiscordant relationships. Identification of such serodiscordant couples through couple HIV testing and counseling (HTC) is thought to promote safe sexual behavior and reduce the probability of within couple seroconversion. However, it is possible HTC benefits are not sustained over time and therefore repeated HTC may be more effective at preventing seroconversion than one time HTC. We tested this theory in Zomba, Malawi by randomly assigning 170 serodiscordant couples to receive repeated HTC and 167 serodiscordant couples to receive one time HTC upon study enrollment (control group). We used linear probability models and probit model with couple fixed effects to assess the impact of the intervention on risky sexual behavior. At one-year follow-up, we found that couples that received repeated HTC reported significantly more condom use. However, we found no difference in rate of seroconversion between groups, nor did we find differences in subjective expectations about seroconversion or false beliefs about HIV, two expected pathways of behavior change. We conclude that repeated HTC may promote safe sexual behavior, but this result should be interpreted with caution, as it is inconsistent with the result from biological and subjective outcomes

Gender Discrimination and Social Identity: Evidence from Urban Pakistan

This paper investigates how gender discrimination depends on the social identities of interacting parties. We use data from economic decision-making experiments to identify gender discrimination and randomly matched 2,836 male and female students pursuing bachelors-equivalent degrees in three different types of institutions that represent distinct identities within the Pakistani society. Our main finding is that gender discrimination is not uniform in intensity and nature across educated Pakistani society and varies as a function of the social identity of both individuals who interact. While we find no evidence of higher socio-economic status men discriminating against women, men of lower socio-economic status and higher religiosity tend to discriminate against women ?but only women from lower socio-economic status who are closest to them in social distance. Moreover, this discrimination seems to be largely taste-based

Understanding Society Innovation Panel Wave 9: Results from Methodological Experiments. Understanding Society Working Paper Series

This paper presents some preliminary findings from Wave 9 of the Innovation Panel (IP9) of Understanding Society: The UK Household Longitudinal Study. Understanding Society is a major panel survey in the UK. IP9 included experiments on the use mixed mode data collection, the value of respondent incentives, targeted timing of email invitations, measurement of household finances, subjective expectations about returns to schooling, people’s assessment of what constitutes “successful ageing”, format of response options, use of multiple measurements to improve measurement of attitudes, and measurement of sensitive topics. This paper describes the design of IP9, the experiments carried and the preliminary findings from early analysis of the data

Asking about social circles improves election predictions

Election outcomes can be difficult to predict. A recent example is the 2016 US presidential election, in which Hillary Clinton lost five states that had been predicted to go for her, and with them the White House. Most election polls ask people about their own voting intentions: whether they will vote and, if so, for which candidate. We show that, compared with own-intention questions, social-circle questions that ask participants about the voting intentions of their social contacts improved predictions of voting in the 2016 US and 2017 French presidential elections. Responses to social-circle questions predicted election outcomes on national, state and individual levels, helped to explain last-minute changes in people’s voting intentions and provided information about the dynamics of echo chambers among supporters of different candidates