Disagreement or Misunderstanding? A Field Experiment on Parent-Child Differences Over School Choice

Last registered on July 17, 2024
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Disagreement or Misunderstanding? A Field Experiment on Parent-Child Differences Over School Choice
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0013915
Initial registration date
July 13, 2024

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
July 17, 2024, 1:47 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country
Bulgaria
Region

Primary Investigator

Name
Alexandr Lenk
Affiliation
Stanford University
Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2024-04-15
End date
2024-12-31
Keywords
Behavior, Education, Welfare
Additional Keywords
JEL code(s)
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Whenever parents make decisions that do not reflect their children’s preferences, they
have previously been presumed to do so because of preference misalignment. We posit a
new explanation: Parents hold inaccurate beliefs about their children’s preferences despite
valuing such information. We will test this hypothesis and demonstrate the economic relevance of such misinformation
through a field experiment in the high-stakes context of the centralized high school application
process in Bulgaria. We design
an informational intervention that conveys children’s preferences in a transparent way:
we share with parents their child’s personal ranking of schools. We will first measure whether parents are indeed misinformed about their
children's preferences, as well as the extent and nature of such misinformation (e.g., specific school tracks/profiles parents are misinformed about). We will then empirically study whether the intervention
leads to children's final school assignment being closer to their stated ranking.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Lenk, Alexandr. 2024. "Disagreement or Misunderstanding? A Field Experiment on Parent-Child Differences Over School Choice ." AEA RCT Registry. July 17. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.13915-1.0
Sponsors & Partners
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Intervention (Hidden)
Intervention Start Date
2024-04-22
Intervention End Date
2024-07-10

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
The main outcome will be the percentile rank of the school (in child's personal ranking of schools collected in the classroom during researcher visit) corresponding to the school child has been assigned at the first round of the centralized assignment system run by the Bulgarian Ministry of Education.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Step 1: Researcher visits pupils in the classroom and asks them for their personal ranking of schools.
Step 2: A few days later, parent is asked to fill out an online survey about parent's own preferences over school ranking for their child. At the end of the survey, parents are provided with informational material about the application system (e.g., links to the list of schools they can apply to, information about the application process). Then, parents are shown a sample ranking of schools and told this is one possible way of using the informational materials and construct a ranking based on them. In particular, the sample ranking for both control and treated parents corresponds to their own child's ranking. However, only treated parents are explicitly told this is their own child's ranking while control parents are told this is a sample ranking of another participant in this study. The intervention does keeps the display screen and information constant across treatment and control, and only exogenously varies the relevance of the ranking to own child's preferences. Thus, the design implicitly controls for effects related to general reactions to a ranking (e.g., reference point effects) that are not necessarily only driven by learning valuable information about child's own preferences.
Step 3: All parents receive a reminder email with informational materials about the application process one week before the official application is due. They again receive the sample ranking with the same difference in wording between control and treated parents.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Randomization done by a computer at the time a parent starts filling out their online survey
Randomization Unit
Individual
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
0
Sample size: planned number of observations
2000
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
1000-treatment
1000-control
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
STANFORD UNIVERSITY IRB
IRB Approval Date
2023-08-09
IRB Approval Number
N/A
Analysis Plan

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Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials