Getting to intent: Are social norms influencing intentions to use modern contraception in the DRC?
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Costenbader E
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6634398 | biostudies-literature | 2019
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Getting to intent: Are social norms influencing intentions to use modern contraception in the DRC?
Costenbader Elizabeth E Zissette Seth S Martinez Andres A LeMasters Katherine K Dagadu Nana Apenem NA Deepan Prabu P Shaw Bryan B
PloS one 20190716 7
Meeting the reproductive health needs of women in post-conflict settings is a global health priority. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, social norms perpetuate gender-based violence and contribute to low contraceptive use and high fertility. The Masculinité, Famille, et Foi (MFF) intervention is working with communities in Kinshasa to create normative environments supportive of modern contraception access and use. Our analysis uses survey data collected from 900 men and women in 17 commun ...[more]
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Project description:We compare social preference and social norm based explanations for peer effects in a three-person gift-exchange experiment. In the experiment a principal pays a wage to each of two agents, who then make effort choices sequentially. In our baseline treatment we observe that the second agent's effort is influenced by the effort choice of the first agent, even though there are no material spillovers between agents. This peer effect is predicted by the Fehr-Schmidt (1999) model of social preferences. As we show from a norms-elicitation experiment, it is also consistent with social norms compliance. A conditional logit investigation of the explanatory power of payoff inequality and elicited norms finds that the second agent's effort is best explained by the social preferences model. In further experiments we find that the peer effects change as predicted by the social preferences model. Again, a conditional logit analysis favors an explanation based on social preferences, rather than social norms. Our results suggest that, in our context, the social preferences model provides a parsimonious explanation for the observed peer effect.
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