Social Preferences: Measuring Private, Public, and Group Preferences through Focus Groups

Abstract

How does the social nature of focus groups shape what researchers learn about preferences? This article delineates three preference types—private, publicly expressed, and group preferences—and introduces a new method for measuring each in a focus group setting. Original data on people’s preferences for punishing rape, wife beating, and theft across 80 focus groups in 20 villages in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo reveal clear differences across preference types, featuring more extreme punishment preferences in the public sphere. A within-subject experiment also shows that focus group discussions affect people’s private preferences by making them more extreme, which has ethical implications for researchers who use focus groups worldwide. The social nature of preferences observed in Democratic Republic of Congo underscores that scholars must adopt clear and transparent approaches to data comparison to learn about sensitive issues in the face of contested norms.

Legacies of Wartime Sexual Violence: Survivors, Psychological Harms, and Mobilization

“…In subsequent analyses and discussion of our theoretical argument, we prioritize the list experiment measure, because (i) the literature prioritizes it as a measure of this sensitive subject, and (ii) the nature of our outcome variable (sociopolitical mobilization) is inherently social, as is survey disclosure (Lindsey 2023). For scholars interested in comparing our householdlevel measures of sexual violence with event-based geospatial data, we provide correlations between our measures of sexual violence and geospatial data from two widely used, publicly available conflict event datasets in the Supplementary Material.…”