Beyond the Couple: Gender-Transformative Interventions and Normative Beliefs About Reproductive Decision-Making of Newly Married People in India

The ECOVI trial is a two-arm cluster randomized controlled trial (cRCT) conducted in rural and urban communities across Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Rajasthan, India, and funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The trial evaluates the impact of a couples-based financial literacy and gender-transformative intervention ("Let Us Grow Together: Economic Wellbeing for Families") on economic intimate partner violence (IPV), economic decision-making, and economic empowerment among 2,276 married couples across 150 clusters.

This sub-study examines an understudied downstream question: whether such couples-based programs change normative beliefs that extend beyond the treated couple's own relationship to younger generations, particularly their daughters and their sons. Specifically, we ask whether the intervention shifts how treated women and men think about who should have the main say in reproductive decisions for newly married couples, for their daughters and their sons. In an additional analysis, we examine whether respondents apply different standards when reproductive decisions concern their daughter and her husband versus their son and his wife. A difference in the endorsement of women's reproductive autonomy across the two scenarios may indicate an asymmetry in the application of egalitarian norms, whereby respondents are more accepting of autonomy for biological daughters than for daughters-in-law. We further examine whether the intervention reduces this gap by promoting more consistent endorsement of women's reproductive decision-making autonomy across both scenarios.

Items measuring normative beliefs regarding younger generations are added to the ECOVI endline survey before the start of endline data collection. This pre-registration protocol is submitted before any endline data is collected, providing a fully prospective analysis plan. All mediator variables, internalized gender norms, and female household decision-making participation are collected at both baseline and endline as part of the main ECOVI trial.

The sub-study pursues four interconnected objectives: (1) to estimate the causal effect of the intervention on normative beliefs regarding reproductive decision-making; (2) to test whether any such effect operates through a shift in internalized gender norms (the norm internalization channel); (3) to test whether any such effect operates through a shift in perceived community gender norms (the perceived norms channel); and (4) to test whether any such effect operates through an increase in women's participation in household decision-making (the agency channel).