Estimating Young Women Working in Kathmandu’s Adult Entertainment Sector: A Hybrid Application of Respondent Driven Sampling and Venue Site Sampling

Author: Vincent, Kyle; Dank, Meredith; Jackson, Orla; Zhang, Sheldon & Liu, Weidi

Abstract: This study estimates the prevalence of young women, defined as women aged 17 and younger, working in Kathmandu Valley’s adult entertainment sector. A hybrid strategy based on respondent-driven sampling and venue-based studies, giving rise to a mark-recapture estimation strategy, was applied. A sample of 600 female workers were reached through respondent driven sampling, and a sub-sampled set of female workers surveyed within the sampled venues. This unique method was intended to reach the “hidden” population and generate a representative sample, and enable an inference procedure which could overcome the limitations present with either strategy. The resulting estimation procedure made use of elaborate sample weighting schemes, multiple imputation-based procedures, and mark-recapture estimation procedures in order to obtain efficient estimates of the population size and characteristics. The resulting estimation was that the population of young women working in adult entertainment venues in the Kathmandu Valley is 1,650, or approximately 17% of all women in this service sector. This study constitutes the most statistically rigorous estimation of young women working in the adult entertainment sector in the Kathmandu Valley to date, and can serve as a baseline for future anti-human trafficking interventions and may guide the methodology of future studies.

Keywords: child abuse, crime, sexual abuse, quantitative methods, statistics