finance, _Portfolios of the Poor_ (Collins, Morduch, Rutherford and Ruthven 2009). Collins et al.’s goal was to understand “money management” of the poor; how people earning less than $2 a day in Bangladesh, South Africa and India managed their finances; juggling consumption, investments, credit payments, and emergencies. Instead of doing a conventional survey asking questions about credit, savings and assets, they conducted open-ended, narrative, interviews of 250 households in these countries. Each household was visited at least twice a month for a full year and the research team then reconstructed balance sheets and cash-flow statements from these interviews. This unusual technique revealed several patterns that were previously not understood with conventional survey methods, and they estimated that one-shot surveys were missing about half the financial activities of a household. They found that households had to cope with multiple, overlapping sources of uncertainty and risk, and that this required active financial management. A key to being able to cope with financial ups and downs was having the ability to be able to access relatively large sums of money to deal with emergencies and life events. However, respondents faced a “triple-whammy” – low incomes, irregular cash flow, and poor access to financial instruments that were unsuitable to deal with these conditions.

The key finding was that the “portfolios of poor households,” unlike those of the rich, were “managed to ensure that money can be obtained in the desired amounts at the desired times.” (page 61). The book argues this requires an entirely different set of financial instruments than those that are conventionally available in banks and micro-credit organizations. Jonathan Morduch, the economist in the Portfolios team, then teamed with a finance professional, Rachel Schneider, to use the same “financial diaries” method to examine the finances of poor Americans, also finding that they had precarious lives that were not captured in existing data (Morduch and Schneider, 2017). Both books draw on the diary technique to construct “hard facts” but couple this with qualitative analysis of the interview transcripts to provide powerful picture of how poor people in very different parts of the world cope with uncertainty and risk.

Sociologists routinely draw on narrative data from open-ended interviews to address important questions. An important example is Michele Lamont’s book on _The Dignity of Working Men_ (Lamont, 2000). One of her goals is to examine the “inner logic of racism” by understanding the “grammar of evaluation” used by employed, lower-middle class, white and black men in the United States, and white and North-African immigrants in France. Her data consisted of 150 two-hour open-ended interviews – 30 each with blacks in the US and North-Africans in France, and 45 with whites in both countries. She conducted all the interviews herself to avoid interviewer bias, and to reduce her distance from her respondents. Her key finding is that “workers judge members of the other group to be deficient in respect to the criteria they value the most.” They do this “boundary work” by constructing “mental maps” of similarity and difference. Working class white American distinguish themselves from those from higher social classes by seeing them as less disciplined and lacking in “integrity and straightforwardness.” And they see blacks as “lazy” and with “wrong values.” African Americans, on the other hand, consider the upper-class as lacking the criteria they value the most - “the caring self.” And they see whites as domineering and less compassionate. Lamont argues therefore that “moral criteria can generate strong intergroup boundaries,” though, at the same time, it can help bridge differences with statements like “there are good and bad people in all races.” In France, on the other hand, white workers, using the language of class solidarity, see the poor and blacks as “part of us,” but say that North Africans lack civility and are “culturally incompatible with the French.” Lamont thus argues that workers’ definitions of “who is part of us” have little overlap with official, government categories. The construction of difference is thus “bounded by the differentially structured context in which people live.” Interviews are, of course, not the only form of narrative data. A project that I was involved with recorded, transcribed and analyzed 300 village meetings in South India (Sanyal and Rao, 2019). The context for this was the 73<sup>rd</sup> amendment to the Indian constitution that brought deliberative democracy to all 2 million Indian villages. Village meetings are thus supposed to be spaces where citizens could speak freely about public issues, come to agreement, and work with the village council to make decisions and 11