The greatest challenge so you’re able to carrying out empirical education towards dowry is the use up all your otherwise inadequacy of information

2.dos Problems with present study

As the dowry try legitimately blocked when you look at the India and you can Bangladesh, some one always think twice to inform you specific dowry amounts. The product quality concern into dowry regarding Indian dataset requires on the community-based dowry. Particularly, the brand new India People Invention Questionnaire requires “Generally in the region having a family such as your own personal, do you know the particular points that are supplied since gift suggestions at the time of the fresh daughter’s wedding?” A residential district-mainly based dowry isn’t the same as just one dowry, which is repaid of the bride’s mothers during marriage. Alternatively, issue out-of dowry lets just a binary address, we.elizabeth., whether or not an optimistic quantity of dowry try paid down (elizabeth.grams., Survey into the Status of females and Virility in both India and you can Pakistan). A binary answer, naturally, will not provide much additional info. Standard out-of whether or not an optimistic dowry amount emerges corresponds so you can, that will be largely informed me by the, ethnic, spiritual, and you can caste backgrounds when you look at the Southern China.

Given that dowry is not legally prohibited into the Pakistan, the quantity in person paid down because of the feminine respondent’s parents would be requested in place of reservation for the good Pakistani dataset for instance the Pakistan Rural Family Questionnaire. Even when Pakistani interviewees may well not intentionally keep hidden correct information about dowry techniques, the brand new questionnaire may nonetheless contain remember errors since participants need recall the fresh dowry number repaid by their parents several years ago. Profile 1a plots the latest predict level of actual dowry opinions counted inside the Pakistani Rupees in 2004 on to wedding seasons using study out-of new Pakistan Rural House Survey. As consensus is that genuine dowry amounts is expanding, or perhaps exhibit a low-declining pattern, the latest figure implies the entire desire off bear in mind errors. This means, the new offered the fresh pit between the interviewees’ relationships and the recall go out, the much more likely he or she is to help you overestimate the fresh new dowry number.

Dating anywhere between ladies ounts. New line shows brand new forecast actual level of dowry regressed on women’s marriage year. The brand new shaded city shows 95% believe period of your own predict amount of dowry. The details sourced elements of (a) and you will (b) is Pakistan Outlying Home Questionnaire 2004, therefore the outlying household questionnaire used by the writer from inside the 2013, respectively

3 Data

Toward better of our knowledge, research amassed contained in this studies are the very first to consider explicitly a standard habit of overestimate a price paid down a long time ago. Just like the characteristics out-of prior to now collected studies, ours also are retrospective; not, centered on which interest, i for example followed particular efforts to attenuate survey remember errors. Particularly, we requested the level of each other community-dependent dowry (non-retrospective) and private dowry count paid in the course of the brand new respondent’s marriage (retrospective). Given that Pakistani dowry includes gold/jewelry, dresses, seats, cooking equipment, and so on, i queried dowry number by the items. If we felt an excellent respondent’s overestimation of the dowry count, particularly in the scenario regarding a wedding one to took place an excellent few years in the past, as the dowry try shown, we could and you can did check such numbers having those who went to new ceremony. For that reason, all of our study towards forecast real levels of dowry (Fig. 1b) do not show one coming down development, on the other hand which have those said in Fig. 1a.

step 3.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 Italiensk kvindelig 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).