The most significant challenge so you can carrying out empirical education toward dowry s the use up all your or inadequacy of data

2.2 Difficulties with established research

As the dowry was legally banned inside Asia and you may Bangladesh, anybody usually hesitate to show exact dowry quantity. The quality matter on dowry regarding Indian dataset requires on community-dependent dowry. Instance, brand new India Human Creativity Survey asks “Fundamentally in your community to possess a family eg your own, what are the brand of items that are given given that gift ideas during the newest daughter’s relationship?” A residential area-situated dowry is not the identical to just one dowry, that is paid from the bride’s parents in the course of relationships. Rather, practical question out of dowry allows just a binary address, we.elizabeth., regardless of if a positive amount of dowry was paid off (e.g., Questionnaire on the Standing of women and you can Fertility in India and you may Pakistan). A digital answer, definitely, will not bring far more details. The norm out of whether an optimistic dowry amount exists corresponds to help you, which will be mainly informed me of the, ethnic, spiritual, and you can status experiences within the South China.

Since the dowry is not legitimately prohibited in Pakistan, the total amount yourself repaid because of the women respondent’s parents are going to be requested without scheduling from inside the a Pakistani dataset for instance the Pakistan Rural Home Survey. Although Pakistani interviewees may not purposefully hide true information about dowry means, new questionnaire will get nonetheless include recall errors because respondents need certainly to recall the newest dowry amount paid off by the the mothers in the past. Shape 1a plots the predict amount of genuine dowry viewpoints measured for the Pakistani Rupees from inside the 2004 onto relationship 12 months having fun with analysis out of the latest Pakistan Outlying House Survey. Just like the opinion would be the fact actual dowry amounts are broadening, or perhaps exhibit a low-declining pattern, the brand new contour ways the entire inclination away from remember mistakes. Quite simply, the new lengthened the brand new gap involving the interviewees’ wedding as well as the bear in mind time, the much more likely he is to overestimate the fresh dowry number.

Dating ranging from ladies ounts. New range reveals brand new predicted genuine number of dowry regressed for the ladies relationship season. The brand new shaded city reveals 95% confidence period of predict number of dowry. The knowledge sources of (a) and you can (b) try Pakistan Rural Household Questionnaire 2004, and also the rural domestic questionnaire presented by creator in 2013, correspondingly

step three Studies

To your better of all of our studies, data built-up within analysis certainly are the very first to consider explicitly an over-all habit of overestimate a price repaid very long back. Similar to the functions off prior to now amassed study, ours also are retrospective; however, according to that it tendency, i particularly adopted particular operate to reduce questionnaire remember mistakes. For example, i requested the amount of one another neighborhood-oriented dowry (non-retrospective) and private dowry number reduced at the time of the fresh new respondent’s wedding (retrospective). Once the Pakistani dowry includes gold/jewelry, outfits, furniture, cooking equipment, and stuff like that, i queried dowry amounts from the product. If we noticed a good respondent’s overestimation of the dowry count, especially in possible from a married relationship you to definitely occurred a great long time in the past, as the dowry are displayed, we are able to and you may did look at this type of amounts that have those who attended brand new ceremony. For that reason, our very own research with the predict actual levels of dowry (Fig. 1b) do not reveal any coming down pattern, in contrast Japansk kvindelig that have those people advertised into the Fig. 1a.

step 3.step 1 Questionnaire

When conducting our survey between , we intended to capture the heterogeneous aspects of the Punjab province in Pakistan. We divided Punjab (36 districts) into five regions: Pothohar (or North), Central, East, West, and South Punjab. Climate, culture (including marriage/inheritance practices), and socioeconomic conditions differ across regions but are similar within each region. We randomly selected one district from each region, namely, Rawalpindi, Mandi Bahauddin, Narowal, Muzaffargarh, and Bahawalnagar (Fig. 2). We used the district census for 1998–1999, the latest census available in Pakistan as of 2013, to randomly select six villages in rural areas in each of the five districts. We restricted sampling villages to those with a population of at least 1000 at the time of the census. In each village, we selected 22 households, following a stratified random sampling methodology. First, with assistance from the village chief, we made a list of households in the village and categorized them into a stratum. The strata are kammees Footnote 10 (i.e., traditional service or lower caste, with annual income ? PKR 200,000, > PKR 200,000) and zamindars (i.e., landowning farmers with land < 5,>12.5 acres). Eligible households in our survey are defined as those with an economically active husband and wife aged 15–65. Second, we performed stratified random sampling so that the share of each stratum in our sample corresponds to the share of each stratum of the village population (= households).