A dyadic interview guide to explore intra-household decision-making

Studies in the agricultural research for development literature that explore women’s involvement
in decision-making within the household tend to focus their analysis on married or cohabiting
couples and often consult only one spouse in a marital dyad during field interviews. These and
other studies in the literature explore who makes a particular decision within the household, and
more recently, inquire about the extent to which the respondent or another household member
was involved in the decision-making process. Few studies investigate why decisions are made by
one person or jointly or about the process used to make decisions within the household. Studies
on intra-household decision-making frequently use quantitative tools (e.g., survey instruments) to
collect data on who decides on a specific production or consumption matter within the household.
In contrast, qualitative tools or mixed methods are more appropriate for uncovering how or why
intra-household decisions get made. This working paper presents a review of the extant literature
on intra-household decision-making, with a specific interest in describing the different methods
and tools studies used to assess women’s and men’s involvement in decision-making within the
household. The paper argues for using dyadic interviews as one qualitative method to explore
intra-household decision-making. Dyadic interviews bring two participants together to interact and
respond to open-ended questions that focus on their relationship as the site for which experiences
making decisions takes place. To date, most qualitative or mixed-methods studies use focus group
discussions or semi-structured interviews to explore decision-making within the household and
separate spouses or organize women and men into sex-segregated groups during the interview
or discussion process. The paper reviews the literature on dyadic interviews and presents and
discusses the results from a study that developed and piloted a qualitative dyadic interview guide
to help understand how and why decisions get made and explore, with some level of precision,
the decisions that get made jointly or by only one spouse, and the contributions made by each
spouse during a decision-making process. The guide could assist researchers in conducting in-depth
interviews for a qualitative study or being part of a mixed-methods study to inform or nuance
findings from the quantitative component on intra-household decision-making.