This led to the decision to make domestic violence (which was at the time not a topic studied much by economists) a focus of the analysis. In the process of trying to elicit responses on this sensitive issue, in the first week our respondents told us, basically, that life was tough but manageable. Their main problems were with the government – lack of good schools, lack of adequate drinking water, etc. After a week of staying in the village and continuing our interviews, one of the women finally opened up and said, “You have become our friends and we can’t lie to you anymore. Let me tell you the truth. We feel like we are in jail. Our husbands beat us all the time and no one helps when that happens. They spend all the family money on alcohol, and when they come home – no one can help us.” We then explored these issues further through in-depth interviews with men and women who outlined the cold rational calculation behind much of the violence.

Based on these discussions a few key questions on wife-beating were added to the quantitative survey instrument. The analysis of the qualitative and the quantitative data demonstrated the links of domestic violence to issues of control and power within the family, female sterilization (which led to an increased risk of being accused of infidelity), alcoholism, and dowry demands. Since the qualitative work demonstrated, among other things, that domestic violence was often a rational choice undertaken to forcibly extract money from the wife’s family, it also led us to rethink how economists modeled both intra-household and transfers behavior. Without the fieldwork, we would have never thought of studying domestic violence. Being in the field and engaging in many months of participant observation allowed issues to be probed in the field the moment they were observed. This permitted ‘surprises’ to be easily incorporated into the data gathering process. These surprises were often everyday, even mundane, experiences in the lives of the rural poor and only surprising to relatively affluent outsiders. The malleability of “iterative field research” is the fact that reorienting the analysis based on observations in the field is a key element of the method, adds value to traditional econometric practice by discovering and locating important but understudied issues within the research discourse.

Initially my hope was to incorporate the qualitative work, the theory that emerged from it, and the econometric analysis into one paper. Where the qualitative would contribute to the standard positivist frame of generating insights, which would inform a theoretical model that would generate predictions that could be tested for their generalizability with econometric analysis (Rao, 1997b). However, my co-author Francis Bloch and I found it difficult to publish this version. Referees did not like the qualitative work, and neither did editors, and we were rejected by three journals. We finally decided to split it into two papers, a mixed-methods empirical paper (Rao, 1997a) published in a public health journal (which provides the full range of results) and an economics paper which introduced information asymmetry into a bargaining model, and explained why in that social context husbands might be able to treat their wives as hostages from whom they can extract higher post-marital dowries (Bloch and Rao, 2002).

The tendency in economics to treat qualitative work, from ethnographies, or open-ended interviews, or case-studies, as “anecdote” rather than “data” is, I think, deeply limiting. It constrains the use of information and limits the kinds of questions that can be asked. Nothing illustrates this more than Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize winning work (Ostrom, 1990) which is full of insights from careful case-studies and qualitative work that she conducted with her research collaborators all over the world. It is these case-studies that allowed her to gather the evidence to develop theories refuting the received wisdom that collective action was more likely to fail than succeed because individual interests would outweigh the gains from collective participation (e.g. Olson, 1965). Ostrom demonstrated in several insightful analyses of case-studies of communities, that norms for collective action evolve through repeated interaction, and this repeated interaction creates stable institutions for managing a wide range of common property resources including the management of water and forests. It is important to note that Ostrom was trained as a political scientist, taught in a political science department, and (to the best of my knowledge) did not publish her largely qualitative and experimental empirical work in an economics journal till after she won 9