Rights perceived and practiced 2nd Part Results of the surveys carried out in Brazil, India, Mozambique and the United Kingdom, as part of the project “Domestic Work and Domestic Workers Interdisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives"

Abstract

The following analysis gives an account of the data collected in Brazil, India, Mozambique, and United Kingdom within the framework of the research project Domestic Work and Domestic Workers. The annexed tables on which it is based are structured exactly the same way as the ones presenting the data collected in Portugal, introduced in a former working paper (Guibentif, 2011). Financed by a Portuguese entity, and sustained mainly by a team based in Lisbon, the project was in condition to collect a considerable amount of data in Portugal, where we could interview a sample of nearly 700 people. For financial and organizational reasons, it was impossible to carry out a comparable research operation in other countries. With the efficient support of colleagues involved in the international research network set up for the project, we succeeded in applying the same questionnaire as in Portugal to more modest samples in Brazil, India, Mozambique, and United Kingdom. We want to express here our warm thanks to Maria Lígia Barbosa, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Ramapriya Gopalakrishnan, from Chennai, India, and Nelson Chapananga, from Nampula, Mozambique, who organized these surveys. Given the more limited number of questionnaires under analysis, it is not possible to draw conclusions comparable to those that could be derived from the analysis of the Portuguese data. In Portugal, without being in condition to measure the precise representativeness of our sample, we can show that interviewees’ characteristics correspond to some extent to what we know nowadays about domestic workers in this country. And the plausibility of the information collected on several questions allows us to make a positive global evaluation of the data’s quality. This is not the case for the data collected in other countries. So our aim here is merely to identify the main common features, as well as the main differences, always keeping in mind the results of the Portuguese survey, as a frame of interpretation. As far as the features of domestic work in the countries analyzed are concerned, our data cannot lead us to conclusions, but to hypotheses to be confirmed, when possible, by other researches carried out in the compared countries. However, we are in condition to formulate statements on domestic work in general, as conditioned by different societal and national contexts.