In Simple Words
Imagine testing an employee's honesty in a simple coin-tossing game before hiring them. If their decisions in the game show high fairness, it reliably predicts whether they will actually show up on time and do their job diligently at work when nobody is watching.
Observed public health providers in Nairobi
- Did not always return the initial transfer
- Group used for comparison
- Always returned at least the initial transfer
- Lower absence was observed
Observed association; visits occurred the following week. This does not prove game behavior causes attendance or establish screening accuracy.
See source →Research question
Evaluating frontline health worker intrinsic motivation and predicting real-world work effort like absenteeism in developing countries is challenging. Traditional surveys often suffer from self-reporting bias and fail to reflect actual behavioral choices on the job.
Participants
N = 94 health providers (re-visited out of 103 total workshop participants) from primary health facilities in Nairobi, Kenya.
Study Design
Linking individual provider decision-making in a baseline Trust Game (measuring returned-received monetary ratios before reporting treatments) with unannounced follow-up facility visits conducted 1 week later to record actual worker attendance.
Results
Health workers who were consistently reciprocal in the baseline Trust Game (always returning a returned-received ratio >= 1 regardless of amount received) were significantly less likely to be absent during unannounced visits (38% absence rate for high-reciprocity public workers vs. 61% for low-reciprocity workers, p < 0.05), proving that lab-in-the-field game choices mirror real-world workplace effort.
Takeaway
Utilize behavioral game exercises during public health workforce screening to identify candidate intrinsic prosociality and mitigate downstream employee absenteeism.
Source and citation
See source →Read alongside the research
Plain-English glossary
Original explanations, informed by the references below. Examples are illustrations, not data from the studies above. The research text stays unchanged.
- Follow-up
Collecting more information about participants later in a study to see what has happened to them. The term can also mean the length of time researchers keep track of them.
ExampleResearchers interview the same workers three months after a programme ends. That later interview is a follow-up.
GET-IT glossary · Follow-up ↗Read more about follow-up →- Baseline
The starting measurements in a study. Researchers use these to compare what participants were like at the start with what happens later.
ExampleBefore a training programme starts, researchers measure workers’ earnings. That first measurement is the baseline.
GET-IT glossary · Baseline characteristics ↗Read more about baseline →