Accessing Married Adolescent Women: The Realities of Ethnographic Research in an Urban Slum Environment in Dhaka, Bangladesh

This article reports on the problem of obtaining reproductive histories from women in the slums of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Access to women in these slums is controlled by several gatekeepers. The gatekeeper problem is common in all field research, but the problem is particularly difficult when the research involves interviewing young Muslim women on the sensitive issue of reproductive health and family planning.