After our field visit, we had a brainstorming session to figure out our next steps.
One of the biggest hurdles we are anticipating is in recruiting study participants for the parent-child experiment. Among the students we spoke to, all were willing to participate in the anonymous online survey and the college-student experiment. However, barring one person who said that their mother might be willing to participate in the survey, everyone else told us that their parents would not be comfortable with a survey on relationships and arranged marriages. Ironically, this proves the point we are trying to establish through our study! The goal behind the parent-child experiment was to document that there is a communication gap between parents and their children when it comes to preferences about dating and marriage. If children feel awkward discussing these issues with their parents, they are likely to have biased beliefs about whether their parents would approve of them dating before marriage, which might in turn deter them from doing so, contributing to the persistence of traditional/conservative norms. Based on our recruitment experience so far, we will have to come up with a creative solution to recruit parents for the parent-child study.
One of our survey enumerators also suggested that we might want to focus on students enrolled in the School of Open Learning (SOL), rather than in full-time DU colleges. She felt that the students at SOL are likely to have more free time, compared to DU students who have a tight schedule of classes all day. She also reported that many of the DU students she approached during our visit said they didn’t have time for the study because they were busy with exams. While we were on campus, our other enumerator even managed to get access to a WhatsApp group with nearly 500 students who study at SOL. Our plan is to try and recruit some of the students on the group and also make another visit to the SOL campus (which is easier to get access to than DU college campuses). If we do find that recruiting students at SOL is much easier, we may decide to limit our sample to these students for consistency.
Although Fall may be arriving soon in Cambridge, Delhi will continue to see average temperatures above 90 degrees for the next month. Since the conditions for in-person recruitment are far from ideal at the moment, we’ve decided to postpone recruitment until October. Until then, we plan to administer the online survey to the people we managed to recruit already on campus and through WhatsApp groups. These preliminary survey results will hopefully give us an early indication of how college students in Delhi think about issues around dating and marriage, and the extent to which they might be misperceiving the beliefs and preferences of their peers. We look forward to digging into this data!
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