Sustaining the integrity of the threatened self: A cluster-randomised trial among social assistance applicants in the Netherlands.

Stereotypes and stigma associated with living on welfare or a low income can be a psychological threat that hampers performance and undermines aspirations. Our paper explores the potential of a novel self-affirmation intervention to mitigate such adverse impacts. The intervention comprises a verbal self-affirmation exercise for applicants during their first meeting with a caseworker. We conduct a cluster-randomised trial among a sample of 174 applicants for social assistance benefits in a Social Services office in Maastricht, the Netherlands. We measure outcomes on feelings of self-worth, stress, societal belonging, job search behaviour self-efficacy and cognitive performance immediately after the meeting. In our full sample, the intervention has a negative impact on feelings of societal belonging, but no effect on other outcomes. Effects, however, vary by subgroups. Our treatment increases negative feelings of self-worth and negatively affects societal belonging, but also improves cognitive performance among the group that had paid work in the previous two years. By contrast, self-affirmation positively impacts job search behaviour self-efficacy and cognitive performance for individuals who face increased challenges to (re)integrate into the labour market, proxied by lower levels of education or social assistance receipt in the previous two years. Since our intervention gives rise to testing more than one null hypothesis, we control the false discovery rate using the Benjamini-Hochberg approach. Our findings are sobering. Effects only remain significant for negative feelings of self-worth and improved cognitive performance for one particular subgroup: individuals with paid work in the past two years. This suggests self-affirmation may have reminded them of the time they still had a job, hence creating a backlash effect on feelings of self-worth. At the same time, they may have felt a need to distinguish themselves from others on social assistance benefits resulting in better cognitive performance. These interpretations are consistent with theory and empirical evidence on social identity and self-categorisation. We discuss the implications of our results and outline avenues for future work

Breaking Down Menstrual Barriers in Bangladesh; Cluster RCT Evidence on School Attendance and Psychosocial Outcomes of Adolescent Girls

Girls’ poor ability to manage menstrual health (MH) imposes barriers to education and general wellbeing, especially in low- and middle-income countries. This paper presents the results of the Ritu trial, a 2-year clustered randomized controlled trial, examining the effect of a multi-faceted menstrual health intervention in Bangladesh. We randomized 148 schools from one rural district, into one of three groups; i) receiving a school program (sanitation facilities, MH education and support); ii) a school program and a targeted household program (parental MH education); iii) or the control group. The primary beneficiaries are schoolgirls in grades 6 until 8, age 11-15. We measure short- to medium-term impacts on school attendance, a set of psychosocial outcomes, and menstrual health outcomes. We use three sources of school attendance data: information from administrative records; self-reported survey responses and data from spot-checks where someone from the research team would appear unannounced and on randomly selected dates at school to record attendance. We find significant treatment effects in both treatment arms. The Ritu trial significantly improved menstrual health outcomes. Moreover, it significantly reduced school absence rates and reduced the likelihood of dropping out of school before grade 8. The program also improved psychosocial wellbeing and empowerment during menses, but this did not translate into substantial improvement of general wellbeing and empowerment. We find little evidence that the additional household program generated larger effects than the school program alone – which is important for programming purposes given the substantial additional costs of the household intervention. Our findings show the school program was considerably more cost-effective than the combined program, both when measured in ‘additional years of schooling’ and ‘learning-adjusted years of schooling’. Even though MH programs are becoming more prevalent, supporting quantitative evidence on their impact is very limited. We show a positive impact of a menstrual health program on school attendance and other psychosocial outcomes of adolescent girls

Gender attitudes in the Arab region - The role of framing and priming effects

Most evidence on survey response effects is based in the Western world. We use data from two randomized experiments built into a nation-wide representative household survey in Tunisia to analyze the effects of framing and priming on responses to gender attitudes in the Arab context. Our first experiment shows that questions on attitudes towards decision-making power when framed in an equality frame reduce responses in favor of gender inequality. In our second experiment we find that responses to attitudes towards domestic violence are susceptible to an audio primer. Oral statistical information about the incidence of domestic violence in Tunisia increases disapproval of domestic violence among the male subsample further, but does not affect women. In terms of impact heterogeneity, we find mixed results for treatment interventions interacting with the gender of the interviewer and the interviewer’s perceived religiosity

Replication data for: Violent Conflict and Behavior: A Field Experiment in Burundi

We use a series of field experiments in rural Burundi to examine the impact of exposure to conflict on social, risk, and time preferences. We find that conflict affects behavior: individuals exposed to violence display more altruistic behavior towards their neighbors, are more risk-seeking, and have higher discount rates. Large adverse shocks can thus alter savings and investments decisions, and potentially have long-run consequences—even if the shocks themselves are temporary. (JEL C93, D12, D74, 012, 017, 018