Research >> Social inequality

This study documents and contextualizes a new puzzle about reported happiness among married women using data from India, a large developing country with severe gender discrimination. Gender inequality has been widely documented in India. For example, prior studies show that...Read More..

The Social Attitudes Research, India (SARI) project is among the first to study prejudice and discrimination in India using a low-cost mobile phone survey. We collect representative data on explicit prejudice and discrimination against women, Dalits, and Muslims. We also measure public attitudes...Read More..

This paper uses data from the newly done phone survey by r.i.c.e. called Social Attitudes Research, India (SARI). It studies explicit prejudice against women and Dalits in Delhi, Mumbai, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. We find high levels of explicit prejudice...Read More..

Through the use of new survey data, the experiences and perceptions of discrimination among Dalits and Muslims have been quantified. One important result is that many respondents report experiencing discrimination at school and in interactions with government officials. These results...Read More..

In high-income countries, population health surveys often measure mental health.  This is less common in low- and middle-income countries, including in India, where mental health is under-researched relative to its disease burden.  The objective of this study is to assess...Read More..

Women and girls in India face many forms of discrimination throughout the life course.  Gender inequality has important consequences for women themselves, and also for their families and communities. The 2011 India Human Development Survey found that in about a...Read More..

Since October 2014, the Government of India has worked towards the goal of eliminating open defecation by 2019 through the Swachh Bharat Mission. In June 2014, the results of a survey of rural sanitation behaviour in North India were first...Read More..

Objective: We assess the feasibility of measuring awareness and use of medical abortion via a mobile phone survey on social attitudes in India. Study design: In 2018, we conducted a mobile phone survey with 3455 married men and women in...Read More..

Manual scavenging is caste-based work which has been handed down over generations, subjecting the same families and communities to deep humiliation, social exclusion, and poor health. This book chapter argues that same casteist attitudes that relegate Dalits to the filthy work...Read More..

This book chapter discusses why rural Indians tend to reject affordable sanitation options, using which many poorer countries in the developing world have either completely eliminated or have successfully reduced open defecation. The practice of open defecation has negative externalities...Read More..

This paper investigates disparities in child height — an important marker of population-level health — among population groups in rural India.  India is an informative context in which to study processes of health disparities because there is wide heterogeneity in...Read More..

An analysis of child height-for-age using the newly released data from the National Family Health Survey-4 indicates that the average child height increased by about four-tenths of a height-for-age standard deviation between 2005 and 2015. Although important, this increase is...Read More..

Intermarriage between races or castes is often used as a measure of average, population-level social tolerance.  It is commonly assumed that increases in education will make a society more tolerant.  General Social Survey (GSS) data between 1990 and 2016 show...Read More..

Studies from the United States document important racial gaps in health. In developing societies, research on social disadvantage and health is more limited. Mental health, in particular, is poorly understood relative to its disease burden. Our study contributes the first...Read More..

Open defecation in rural India presents a puzzle: India has far higher open defecation rates than other developing regions where people are poorer, literacy rates are lower, and water is more scarce.  Because open defecation has terrible consequences for health,...Read More..

The hypothesis that a woman's social status has intergenerational effects on the human capital of her children has featured prominently in development policy and social science. Our paper is the first to econometrically identify such an effect. We exploit an...Read More..