Does matching interviewer and respondent gender improve data quality and reduce social desirability bias? Evidence from a mobile phone survey in India
Payal Hathi 
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Diane Coffey University of Texas at Austin, USA
Amit Thorat Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
Amanda Nagle University of Texas at Austin, USA
Gender matching between interviewers and respondents has been used to improve survey quality. Research on interviewer gender effects from the United States and Europe finds that men respondents are sometimes more likely to report conservative attitudes to men interviewers than women interviewers. This study from a phone survey in India does not find that men report significantly different social attitudes to men and women interviewers. This suggests that in places where conservative and patriarchal social attitudes are widespread and accepted, common phenomena such as social desirability and gender performance may operate differently than in western contexts. We additionally find that …
