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

2.dos Problems with current study

Because dowry is https://kissbrides.com/chinese-women/nanchang/ actually lawfully blocked for the Asia and Bangladesh, somebody usually think twice to reveal accurate dowry quantity. The high quality question for the dowry in the Indian dataset asks about community-depending dowry. Like, new Asia Peoples Advancement Questionnaire asks “Generally in your community to possess children including your personal, do you know the types of issues that are supplied just like the merchandise in the course of the fresh daughter’s relationships?” A residential area-mainly based dowry is not the same as an individual dowry, that is reduced from the bride’s moms and dads in the course of marriage. Instead, issue off dowry allows simply a binary respond to, i.age., though a positive quantity of dowry try paid back (age.g., Survey on Condition of females and you can Fertility both in India and you may Pakistan). A digital respond to, needless to say, cannot render far info. Typical from if an optimistic dowry amount exists matches in order to, and that is mostly said because of the, ethnic, spiritual, and you may status experiences in the South Asia.

Because the dowry isn’t legitimately banned during the Pakistan, the amount personally reduced from the female respondent’s moms and dads can be requested as opposed to booking within the an effective Pakistani dataset like the Pakistan Rural House Questionnaire. Though Pakistani interviewees may not intentionally cover true information about dowry practices, the newest questionnaire could possibly get nevertheless contain bear in mind problems given that respondents must remember the dowry amount paid down by the its mothers previously. Figure 1a plots the predict quantity of actual dowry philosophy measured inside the Pakistani Rupees for the 2004 to marriage season playing with research away from the fresh new Pakistan Rural Home Survey. Due to the fact opinion is that real dowry wide variety is actually increasing, or perhaps exhibit a non-declining trend, brand new figure implies the entire interest regarding keep in mind errors. To put it differently, the latest lengthened the brand new gap between the interviewees’ marriage in addition to recall go out, the much more likely he or she is to help you overestimate the brand new dowry number.

Relationships anywhere between ladies ounts. This new range suggests the new predict genuine amount of dowry regressed towards women’s relationships season. New shaded area suggests 95% believe interval of predict level of dowry. The info sourced elements of (a) and you can (b) try Pakistan Outlying Family Survey 2004, additionally the outlying domestic questionnaire conducted by the blogger within the 2013, correspondingly

3 Investigation

Towards the best of our knowledge, data accumulated in this research is the earliest to look at explicitly a standard tendency to overestimate a cost reduced lengthy before. Similar to the attributes from previously collected investigation, ours are retrospective; although not, centered on this desire, i particularly used particular work to minimize questionnaire keep in mind problems. Such as for instance, we asked for the degree of each other community-dependent dowry (non-retrospective) and private dowry count paid down during the newest respondent’s marriage (retrospective). While the Pakistani dowry contains gold/jewelry, outfits, chairs, cooking utensils, and stuff like that, we queried dowry numbers because of the item. If we felt a good respondent’s overestimation of the dowry amount, especially in your situation away from a married relationship you to definitely occurred an excellent number of years ago, once the dowry was displayed, we are able to and did have a look at such quantity that have those who went to the latest ceremony. Consequently, our research towards forecast actual levels of dowry (Fig. 1b) don’t let you know one coming down pattern, conversely having the individuals claimed from inside the Fig. 1a.

3.step one 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 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).