Profile-Based Auditing of Domestic Violence Survey Selection Across South Asia

arXiv:2611.15106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Domestic violence (DV) data in the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are collected through a specialized module whose household-level sampling and privacy requirements create a distinct observation process. We ask whether demographic, socioeconomic, and household characteristics form reproducible population profiles and whether these profiles contain information about selection into the DV module across South Asia. Using DHS Individual Recode data for 796,374 women aged 15-49 across Afghanistan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan, we harmonize 61 numeric and 8 categorical features, reduce the profile space with PCA, and identify six interpretable profiles.