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The Norms of Power and the Power of Norms
(Narayan and Petesch 2007, 2010; Narayan, Pritchett, and Kapoor 2009; Narayan 2009; Narayan and Petesch 2010). These works apply primarily qualitative techniques, such as focus groups and individual interviews, to examine questions of poverty and how people move out of poverty across diverse contexts in the developing world. A guiding principle for these studies, as with this one, is the focus on learning inductively from local individuals’ experiences and interpretations of their own reality. We wanted to work from a vantage point that gives primacy to local people’s own perceptions and interpretations of their experiences. For this study, we aimed to capture local narratives of different situations where gender differences come into play without imposing pre-conceived concepts and models. The research was conducted in 20 different countries, using the same data collection instruments and the same set of questions for all cases, which permitted a multi-country assessment of similarities, trends, and patterns. A set of research instruments was developed including three focus group interview guides—one for each of the three different age groups included in the study, as well as a separate questionnaire for the key informant in each community; the same set of instruments was used in all countries to ensure comparability.5 Changes to adapt language or make additions that were more appropriate for local conditions were discussed between the local and global research teams to ensure that comparability was respected. The research strategy was flexible enough to capture bottomup data from very different places and also to provide a reasonably adequate means for comparative analysis of the large volume of data collected.6 The data collected was transcribed into text documents following a template provided by the global team and analyzed by a mix of techniques, including coding and interpretative analysis. To ensure validity, we verified conclusions (as suggested by Miles and Huberman 1994) and cross-checked them with the national reports by the local teams. However, it is important to note that this is, first and foremost, a subjective exploration; the samples are small and not statistically representative of each country or region. We chose 97 communities in the 20 countries to contribute to a unique dataset made up of men’s and women’s focus groups with three different age groups (more than 500 focus groups), pulled from remote mountain top villages in Bhutan to refugee camps in Sudan to urban neighborhoods in Vietnam and Poland (see table I.1). Sample countries were chosen opportunistically from all world regions and, when possible, from different realities within each region.7 However, the identification of the sample was also dependent on the availability of local research teams, funding, and time constraints determined by the production cycle of World Development Report 2012. The local research teams in each study country consisted of lead researchers with extensive country knowledge and qualitative field experience, plus experienced focus group facilitators who received training and followed a detailed methodology guide to conduct the fieldwork. In each country, the research teams identified the communities to survey, following the study guidelines, which included sampling communities from rural and urban areas and from different On Norms and Agency • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-0-8213-9862-3