The most significant challenge to performing empirical education into dowry ‘s the lack or inadequacy of data
dos.2 Problems with existing analysis
Since the dowry is lawfully prohibited when you look at the Asia and you will Bangladesh, anyone constantly hesitate to show real dowry amounts. The product quality concern towards dowry from the Indian dataset requires in the community-established dowry. Like, the India Individual Advancement Questionnaire requires “Fundamentally in your neighborhood to have a household eg a, exactly what are the style of issues that are provided while the gift suggestions in the course of the fresh new daughter’s relationships?” A residential area-based dowry is not the identical to just one dowry, that is reduced of the bride’s mothers at the time of relationships. As an alternative, the question of dowry allows only a digital address, i.age., whether or not an optimistic amount of dowry was paid off (elizabeth.g., Survey to your Status of females and you will Virility both in India and you can Pakistan). A binary address, needless to say, doesn’t provide far more details. Standard out of if or not a confident dowry amount exists corresponds to, which is mainly explained from the, cultural, religious, and you will status backgrounds inside South China.
As dowry isn’t lawfully blocked during the Pakistan, the amount directly reduced by the feminine respondent’s mothers might be asked as opposed to scheduling from inside the a great Pakistani dataset for instance the Pakistan Rural Domestic Questionnaire. In the event Pakistani interviewees may well not intentionally conceal true details about dowry methods, the survey can get nevertheless include bear in mind mistakes while the respondents need certainly to keep in mind new dowry number paid back because of the their mothers several years ago. Profile 1a plots the fresh predict number of actual dowry values counted inside Pakistani Rupees when you look at the 2004 onto relationships 12 months having fun with data of brand new Pakistan Rural Home Survey. As consensus would be the fact actual dowry numbers is actually increasing, or at least display a low-decreasing trend, the shape suggests all round interest away from remember mistakes. This means that, the fresh new lengthened this new gap involving the interviewees’ wedding together with recall time, the much more likely they are so you can overestimate the new dowry matter.
Matchmaking ranging from ladies’ ounts. The brand new line suggests the predict actual level of dowry regressed to your ladies’ matrimony season. The brand new shady area suggests 95% count on interval of one’s forecast amount of dowry. The content resources of (a) and you may (b) try Pakistan Outlying House Questionnaire 2004, while the outlying domestic survey conducted of the copywriter within the 2013, correspondingly
step three Data
Toward good the knowledge, analysis accumulated within studies will be the basic to take on explicitly a standard tendency to overestimate an amount paid down very long in the past. Just as the characteristics away from in earlier times gathered studies, ours are also retrospective; but not, considering which tendency, we including implemented particular operate to reduce questionnaire bear in mind errors. For example, we requested the degree of both people-built dowry (non-retrospective) and private dowry amount paid back in the course of brand new respondent’s relationship (retrospective). Just like the Pakistani dowry includes gold/precious jewelry, clothing, seats, kitchenware, and the like, i queried dowry amounts yardД±mcД± kaynaklar by item. If we thought good respondent’s overestimation of dowry matter, particularly in possible from a wedding you to happened a number of years ago, as the dowry is actually demonstrated, we can and you can performed take a look at such numbers which have those who went to the fresh new service. Therefore, our studies toward predict actual amounts of dowry (Fig. 1b) do not show people coming down pattern, alternatively with men and women reported from inside the Fig. 1a.
step three.step 1 Survey
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).