Elsevier

Social Networks

Volume 59, October 2019, Pages 134-140
Social Networks

Evaluating sampling biases from third-party reporting as a method for improving survey measures of sensitive behaviors

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2019.07.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We examine potential sampling biases in a surrogate sample of friends.

  • The vast majority of friend nominations were successfully matched to other study participants.

  • Neither men nor women showed any socio-economic differences from their friends.

  • Popularity was associated with number of sexual partners, for men only.

Abstract

Survey participants often misreport their sensitive behaviors (e.g., smoking, drinking, having sex) during interviews. Several studies have suggested that asking respondents to report the sensitive behaviors of their friends or confidants, rather than their own, might help address this problem. This is so because the “third-party reporting” (TPR) approach creates a surrogate sample of alters that may be less subject to social desirability biases. However, estimates of the prevalence of sensitive behaviors based on TPR assume that the surrogate sample of friends is representative of the population of interest. We used sociometric data on social networks in Likoma, Malawi to examine this assumption. Specifically, we use friendship network data to investigate whether friends have similar socio-economic characteristics as index respondents, and to measure possible correlations between the likelihood of inclusion in the surrogate sample and sensitive behaviors. From these results, we suggest approaches to strengthen estimates of the prevalence of sensitive behaviors obtained from TPR.

Section snippets

Background

Sensitive and stigmatizing behaviors that put people’s health at risk are notoriously difficult to measure through surveys, due largely to social desirability biases (Cleland et al., 2004). Survey respondents, for example, misreport how much they smoke (Messeri et al., 2007; Muir et al., 1998), drink (Stockwell et al., 2004) or have sex (Cleland et al., 2004). This may affect estimates of the prevalence of such risk behaviors, as well as the design and evaluation of interventions aimed at

Data

We use data from the first round of the Likoma Network Study (LNS). Likoma is a small island located in the northern part of Lake Malawi, in East Africa. The LNS is a sociometric study (Morris, 2004) aimed primarily at documenting the dynamics of HIV transmission among the island’s population. The LNS did not implement TPR, but did collect data on friendship networks and sexual behaviors (Helleringer et al., 2009, 2014), which allow testing the validity of the two “structural” hypotheses

Analytic approach

We first describe the outdegree distribution of the friendship network, i.e., the number of friends each respondent nominated during the survey (Wasserman and Faust, 1994), by gender. We next assess if the surrogate sample of friends is representative of the population of interest by comparing the distributions of socio-economic characteristics (age, education, marital status, mobility, housing material and availability of a pit latrine in the household) between the samples of respondents and

Results

Nine women (1.8%) and 7 men (1.6%) did not nominate any friend of the same gender, whereas 294 women (58.6%) and 279 men (66.3%) nominated 4 such friends (Fig. 3). Among reported friendships, 2616 (83.9%) relationships were matched to a record in the household rosters.

There were no differences in the distribution of socio-economic characteristics between the respondent and the surrogate samples of men and women (Fig. 4). Among women, the surrogate sample of friends appeared slightly older

Discussion

Asking questions about third parties such as friends and confidants, rather than about respondents themselves, may reduce social desirability biases during surveys of sensitive behaviors. However, third-party reporting (TPR) rests on two structural assumptions about the underlying social networks within which respondents and their friends are embedded. We tested these assumptions using data from the Likoma Network Study.

We found that, among men and women, the surrogate sample produced by TPR

Acknowledgements

The authors' work on this paper was supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R03 HD071122 & P2C HD066613).

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