NCT06916377

The Economics of Domestic Violence: Evidence From Bangladesh

• Status: Active Not Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 440 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Yale University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 65 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

This project aims to test the scalability and cost-effectiveness of edutainment-soap operas designed to challenge harmful social norms and promote resilience-as a strategy to improve mental health and reduce intimate partner violence (IPV) in rural Bangladesh. Investigators will run a clustered randomized control trial in which villages will be randomized to one of three versions of the same soap opera: (i) Norms: Challenges harmful norms that condone IPV, targeting the belief that violence is an acceptable way to assert control or maintain reputation, (ii) Norms + Skills: builds on the norms campaign by adding CBT-based skills for stress management and non-violent conflict resolution, (iii) Placebo: No violence content. Investigators will evaluate the impact on attitudes towards IPV and IPV incidence.

Detailed description

Study design features two layers of commuity-level randomization based on a 3x2 factorial design: First Treatment Variation: Edutainment Content. Communities are randomized into one of three versions of the same soap opera: 1. Norms Campaign (176 communities): Challenges harmful norms that condone IPV, targeting the belief that violence is an acceptable way to assert control or maintain reputation. 2. Norms + Skills Campaign (176 communities): Builds on the norms campaign by adding CBT-based skills for stress management and non-violent conflict resolution. 3. Placebo Campaign (88 communities): Features unrelated content to serve as a control group, isolating the effects of norms and resiliency messaging. This variation allows for assessing the impact of addressing harmful norms alone from the additional benefits of equipping men with practical coping skills. By comparing the Norms Campaign to the Norms + Skills Campaign, investigators test whether adding stress-coping skills yields additional reductions in IPV and related outcomes. Second Treatment Variation: Delivery Modes. Fifty percent of communities in each treatment arm are randomized into one of two delivery modes: 1. Private Delivery: Men watch the soap opera privately at home on handheld devices. 2. Public Delivery: Men watch the soap opera publicly through community screenings. Randomizing delivery modes enables investigators to assess whether men's responses to the intervention are driven by self-esteem concerns (private delivery) or reputation concerns (public delivery). This distinction provides critical insights into the mechanisms underlying IPV and informs the scalability of different delivery methods. In addition to the community-level randomizations, 50 percent of men in each community are randomized into participation in a cash-for-work program. This individual-level randomization allows us to evaluate the role of economic strain in IPV outcomes, testing whether alleviating financial stress enhances the intervention's effectiveness.

Conditions

• Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)
• Intimate Partner Violence Prevention

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Edutainment Content: Norms Campaign	Soap opera that challenges harmful norms that condone IPV, targeting the belief that violence is an acceptable way to assert control or maintain reputation.
BEHAVIORAL	Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)-based skills	CBT-based skills for stress management and non-violent conflict resolution.
BEHAVIORAL	Edutainment Content: Placebo Campaign	Soap opera that features unrelated non-violent content

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-09-19
• Primary completion: 2025-12-01
• Completion: 2025-12-01
• First posted: 2025-04-08
• Last updated: 2025-04-08

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Bangladesh