Addressing Social Desirability Bias When Measuring Child Labor Use
This paper proposes new estimates of child labor use in Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa farms that are certified free of child labor. The study relies on list experiments (LE) to overcome social desirability bias associated with measuring sensitive issues, implemented on a sample of 4,458 Ivorian cocoa farmers. Findings show that 24 percent of them were helped by at least one child under 16 for harvesting and breaking the cocoa pods during the past 12 months, 21 percent for preparing their farm, and 25 percent employed and paid at least one child to perform any task on their cocoa farm. These results are twice as high as those declared by farmers when directly questioning them about their child labor use. This study provides evidence that the LE method, while more cognitively demanding than the direct questioning method, can be successfully understood by populations with low levels of education. Findings further show that, in this setting, the LE estimates are robust to specific LE design changes.
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| Format: | Journal Article biblioteca |
| Language: | English en_US |
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank
2023-09-19
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| Subjects: | LIST EXPERIMENT, SOCIAL DESIRABILITY, CHILD LABOR, CERTIFICATION SCHEMES, DECENT WORK AND ECONOMIC GROWTH, SDG 8, |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099135408012422107/IDU1d9ff451e1ecd91499b1a3c11eb20367dfa1e https://hdl.handle.net/10986/42013 |
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