How we collect and count

How we collect answers

People answer an anonymous online questionnaire (version 3.0) in English or Kiswahili. It takes about 12 minutes. Anyone can skip a question or stop at any time.

Each spouse answers separately, so their answers stay private from each other. The first spouse gets a short couple code to pass on. When the second spouse enters it, the two sets of answers are linked, without names.

What the questionnaire asks

1. A. You and your spouse: whether your spouse is also taking part, and the couple code.
2. B. About you: gender, year of birth, county, education, faith, work and household income.
3. C. Your marriage: when and how you married, children, and where the marriage is today.
4. D. How your marriage feels now: four short satisfaction questions, for people who are still married.
5. E. Your hardest season: what was hard, what started it and how it felt.
6. F. Leaving home: whether either of you ever moved out, for how long, and what happened next.
7. G. Help and change: who helped, what changed and what did not help.
8. H. Looking back: advice for other couples and what you wish you had known.
9. I. Your story and helping others: whether we may share your story, and whether you would mentor another couple. This is a separate choice from the research.

Who takes part

This is a convenience sample. People take part because they found the site, often through a WhatsApp link or through a church, mosque or other partner organisation.

Who has answered so far

How we measure satisfaction

People who are still married answer the CSI-4, a short, widely used measure of how satisfied someone is with their relationship (Funk & Rogge, 2007). It has four questions about happiness, warmth, how rewarding the relationship is, and overall satisfaction.

The answers add up to a score from 0 to 21. A score below 13.5 suggests the relationship may be in distress. It is a signal, not a diagnosis.

How we protect privacy in numbers

• No figure is shown if it is based on fewer than 10 people. You will see "Not enough responses yet" instead.
• We also hide a second figure when needed, so a hidden number cannot be worked out by subtracting from a total.
• You can narrow a chart by at most 3 things at once, such as gender, age and region.
• Organisations cannot view a filtered result based on fewer than 30 people.
• An organisation sees nothing about the people who came through its link until at least 10 of them have answered, and even then only combined numbers, never the answers of one person.
• Names and phone numbers, when people choose to give them, are stored separately from answers and encrypted.

Read our privacy policy

What we leave out

• Spam and duplicate answers, once our staff have checked and flagged them.
• Answers from anyone who asks us to withdraw them.
• Test data. We use made-up practice records only while building the site, and they are never counted on the live site.

Answers that mention violence are kept out of our stories, but they are counted in the statistics, because they are real and they matter.

How the numbers are updated

Statistics are refreshed every hour from the latest answers. Every figure shows how many people it is based on (n) and the date it was last updated.

What the numbers cannot tell you

• Self-report: people tell us what they remember and how they see things. Memory and honesty vary.
• Convenience sample: people who find us through WhatsApp or a faith community may differ from couples who never see the site.
• Association, not cause: if two things go together, it does not prove that one caused the other.
• Translation: a question can feel slightly different in English and in Kiswahili, even when translated with care.

Ethics and approvals

Everyone gives consent before answering, must be 18 or older, and can stop at any time. Ethics approval: approval pending. Research permit (NACOSTI): approval pending.

Data for researchers

University researchers can apply for de-identified data, one row per person, with a codebook. Access starts only after a data-sharing agreement is signed and recorded by our staff.

De-identified means birth year becomes an age band, county becomes a region, couple codes are removed, and free-text answers are left out unless reviewed first.

To ask about access, use the form on our Contact page or email hello@upeo.ai.

How to cite

Please give the figure, its sample size (n), the date shown with it, and the source: Vimeundwa, run by upeo.ai, vimeundwa.co.ke, questionnaire version 3.0.