Evaluación de llamadas de re-contacto con usuarias de la Línea 155

Línea 155, the Colombian national hotline for women victims of violence, is introducing a change in its service protocol. The new protocol will add follow-up calls (to callers who give their consent to be recontacted) aimed at easing behavioral barriers usually faced by victims when seeking institutional help and assess their usage of victim services. We will experimentally evaluate the impact of the follow-up calls on the likelihood of callers using institutional help services and the type of services used.

2023-06-08

2023-12-22

Use of any victim services [self-reported, binary (yes/no)]

Approximately one month after their call to Línea 155, callers who provide their consent to be recontacted (our sample) will be called back by Línea 155. In this call, the Línea 155 operator will ask three short questions: whether she has accessed the referred services, any other support services, and, if not, the reasons or barriers not to access the support services. The responses to the first two questions will be used to create a binary indicator variable of usage of help services. The variable will take value 1 (one) for those who have used any service, and 0 otherwise.

1. Use of specific victim help services [self-reported, four variables, binary (yes/no)]

2. Barriers to access help services [self-reported, two variables, binary (yes/no)]

1. Approximately one month after their call to Línea 155, callers who provide their consent to be recontacted (our sample) will be called back by Línea 155. In this call, the Línea 155 operator will ask three short questions: whether she has accessed the referred services, any other support services, and, if not, the reasons or barriers not to access the support services. The responses to the first two questions will be used to create binary variables indicating the usage of different types of help services: medical, psychosocial, legal, and police. For each type of help service, the variable will take value 1 (one) for those who have used the service, and 0 otherwise.

2. Approximately one month after their call to Línea 155, callers who provide their consent to be recontacted (our sample) will be called back by Línea 155. In this call, the Línea 155 operator will ask three short questions: whether she has accessed the referred services, any other support services, and, if not, the reasons or barriers not to access the support services. The responses to the last question will be used to create binary variables indicating the presence of different types of access barriers to help services: behavioral and structural. For each type of barrier, the variable will take value 1 (one) for those who indicate it was their main barrier to access a service, and 0 otherwise.

We will conduct a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT), with two comparison groups.

Not available

The method will be a quasi-randomization based on data collected by the Línea 155’s system for all calls received. For example, individuals will be assigned to the treatment or control group depending on the value (even or odd) of the minute (or seconds) their first call to Línea 155 is received (or on the value of any other arbitrary system-generated variable). The underlying assumption is that the value of the minute (or seconds) of their first call to Línea 155 is exogenous to the (potential) outcomes of interest.

The randomization unit is the individual.

No

Up to 6800 individuals

Up to 6800 individuals

The sample will be split evenly between treatment and control groups.

Unit: 3.38 percentage points Percentage: 6.75% Standard deviation: 0.135 SD