Family Structure, Maternal Dating, and Sexual Debut: Extending the Conceptualization of Instability

Family structure influences the risk of early onset of sexual intercourse. This study proposes that the family structures associated with risk-single-mother, step-parent, and cohabiting-influence early sexual debut due to family instability, including shifts in family structure and maternal dating, which can undermine parental control and transmit messages about the acceptability of nonmarital sex. 

Previous research has not considered maternal dating as a component of family instability, assuming single mothers who date and those who do not date experience comparable levels of family disruption and transmit similar messages about the acceptability of nonmarital sex. 

Hypotheses are assessed using logistic regression models predicting the odds of early onset of sexual intercourse among 9959 respondents (53 % female, 47 % male) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Respondents were ages 12-17 at the first wave of data collection and 18-26 at the third wave, when respondents reported the age at which they first had sexual intercourse. 

Results show that maternal dating is a source of family instability with repercussions for early sexual debut. Parental control and permissive attitudes towards teenage sex and pregnancy link at-risk family structures and maternal dating to early sexual initiation among females, though these variables do not fully explain family structure and maternal dating effects. Among males, the influence of maternal dating on early sexual debut is fully explained by the learning of permissive sexual attitudes.

Purchase full article at:   http://goo.gl/10kl6S

By:  Zito RC1, De Coster S2.

• 1Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Elon University, 2035 Campus Box, Elon, NC, 27244, USA. rzito@elon.edu.
• 2Department of Sociology and Anthropology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA. 
• J Youth Adolesc. 2016 Mar 7. 

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No Evidence That Polygynous Marriage Is a Harmful Cultural Practice in Northern Tanzania

Significance:  Polygynous marriage is commonly regarded as a harmful cultural practice, detrimental to women and children at the individual and group level. We present counterevidence that polygyny is often positively associated with food security and child health within communities and that, although polygyny and health are negatively associated at the group level, such differences are accounted for by alternative socioecological factors. These results support models of polygyny based on female choice and suggest that, in some contexts, prohibiting polygyny could be costly for women and children by restricting marital options. Our study highlights the dangers of naive analyses of aggregated population data and the importance of considering locally realizable alternatives and context dependency when considering the health implications of cultural practices.

Abstract:  Polygyny is cross-culturally common and a topic of considerable academic and policy interest, often deemed a harmful cultural practice serving the interests of men contrary to those of women and children. Supporting this view, large-scale studies of national African demographic surveys consistently demonstrate that poor child health outcomes are concentrated in polygynous households. Negative population-level associations between polygyny and well-being have also been reported, consistent with the hypothesis that modern transitions to socially imposed monogamy are driven by cultural group selection. We challenge the consensus view that polygyny is harmful, drawing on multilevel data from 56 ethnically diverse Tanzanian villages. We first demonstrate the vulnerability of aggregated data to confounding between ecological and individual determinants of health; while across villages polygyny is associated with poor child health and low food security, such relationships are absent or reversed within villages, particularly when children and fathers are coresident. We then provide data indicating that the costs of sharing a husband are offset by greater wealth (land and livestock) of polygynous households. These results are consistent with models of polygyny based on female choice. Finally, we show that village-level negative associations between polygyny prevalence, food security, and child health are fully accounted for by underlying differences in ecological vulnerability (rainfall) and socioeconomic marginalization (access to education). We highlight the need for improved, culturally sensitive measurement tools and appropriate scales of analysis in studies of polygyny and other purportedly harmful practices and discuss the relevance of our results to theoretical accounts of marriage and contemporary population policy.

Below:  Location of the 56 study villages included in the Whole Village Project. Ethnicity is coded as the most common ethnicity in each village. Red circle, Maasai village; orange triangle, Rangi village; green diamond, Sukuma village; blue square, Meru village; white diamond, other ethnicity village.

Full article at:  http://goo.gl/p3Jx6T

By:  David W. Lawson,a,1 Susan James,b Esther Ngadaya,c Bernard Ngowi,c Sayoki G. M. Mfinanga,c and Monique Borgerhoff Mulderb,d

^aDepartment of Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, WC1E 7HT, United Kingdom;

^bSavannas Forever Tanzania, Arusha, Tanzania;

^cNational Institute for Medical Research, Muhimbili Medical Research Centre, Dar es Salaam, 11101, Tanzania;

^dDepartment of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, CA, 95616

¹To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: ku.ca.mthsl@noswal.divad.

Edited by James Holland Jones, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and accepted by the Editorial Board September 23, 2015 (received for review May 14, 2015)

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Keywords: evolutionary anthropology, public health, family structure, child health, food security