The stated preferences of community-based volunteers for roles in the prevention of violence against women and girls in Ghana: A discrete choice analysis
Date
2023
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Social Science & Medicine
Abstract
Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a human rights violation with substantial health-related conse quences. Interventions to prevent VAWG, often implemented at the community level by volunteers, have been
proven effective and cost-effective. One such intervention is the Rural Response System in Ghana, a volunteer run program which hires community based action teams (COMBATs) to sensitise the community about VAWG
and to provide counselling services in rural areas. To increase programmatic impact and maximise the retention
of these volunteers, it is important to understand their preferences for incentives.
We conducted a discrete choice experiment (DCE) among 107 COMBAT volunteers, in two Ghanaian districts
in 2018, to examine their stated preferences for financial and non-financial incentives that could be offered in
their roles. Each respondent answered 12 choice tasks, and each task comprised four hypothetical volunteering
positions. The first three positions included different levels of five role attributes. The fourth option was to cease
volunteering as a COMBAT volunteer (opt-out).
We found that, overall, COMBAT volunteers cared most for receiving training in volunteering skills and three monthly supervisions. These results were consistent between multinomial logit, and mixed multinomial logit
models. A three-class latent class model fitted our data best, identifying subgroups of COMBAT workers with
distinct preferences for incentives: The younger ‘go getters’; older ‘veterans’, and the ‘balanced bunch’
encompassing the majority of the sample. The opt-out was chosen only 4 (0.3%) times.
Only one other study quantitatively examined the preferences for incentives of VAWG-prevention volunteers
using a DCE (Kasteng et al., 2016). Understanding preferences and how they vary between sub-groups can be
leveraged by programme managers to improve volunteer motivation and retention. As effective VAWG prevention programmes are scaled up from small pilots to the national level, data on volunteer preferences
may be useful in improving volunteer retention.
Description
Research Article
Keywords
Violence against women and girls, Discrete choice experiments