Cultural Meanings and the Aggregation of Actions: The Case of Sex and Schooling in Malawi

Drivers of child marriages for girls: A prospective study in a low-income African setting

Child marriage has adverse consequences for young girls. Cross-sectional research has highlighted several potential drivers of early marriage. We analyse drivers of child marriage using longitudinal data from rural Malawi, where rates of child marriage are among the highest in the world despite being illegal. Estimates from survival models show that 26% of girls in our sample marry before age 18. Importantly, girls report high decision-making autonomy vis-à-vis the decision to marry. We use multivariate Cox proportional hazard models to explore the role of 1) poverty and economic factors, 2) opportunity or alternatives to marriage, 3) social norms and attitudes, 4) knowledge of the law and 5) girls' agency. Only three factors are consistently associated with child marriage. First, related to opportunities outside marriage, girls lagging in school at survey baseline have significantly higher rates of child marriage than their counterparts who were at or near grade level. Second, related to social norms, child marriage rates are significantly lower among respondents whose caregivers perceive that members of their community disapprove of child marriage. Third, knowledge of the law has a positive coefficient, a surprising result. These findings are aligned with the growing qualitative literature describing contexts where adolescent girls are more active agents in child marriages.

Migration Aspirations and Adolescents' Ideal age at Union Formation in Western Mexico

Migration systems shape social life, including the timing and sequencing of key demographic behaviors such as marriage, childbearing, and household formation. Existing research has linked migration and marriage in Mexico through various mechanisms but provides less guidance on whether aspirations for migration and marriage are closely linked. Given that union formation is itself distinct within migration contexts, this article focuses on adolescents' plans for marriage and the extent to which migration aspirations shape the desired timing of their own union formation by examining how four distinct measures of migration aspirations are related to adolescents' ideal ages at marriage in rural Jalisco, Mexico. Drawing from data on adolescents (n=1,403 adolescents) from the Family Migration and Early Life Outcomes Project (collected in 2017-2018), it uses ordinary least squares regression to analyze how various types of adolescent migration aspirations - including permanent migration, temporary labor migration, leaving the community at any point in time, and expected migration location - are associated with adolescents' ideal age at marriage. As the article shows, all migration aspirations are associated with higher ideal ages at marriage in unconditional models. However, these associations are not always robust to the inclusion of other factors, including adolescent aspirations in other life domains, particularly education. Results highlight the ongoing transition from a "culture of migration" to a "culture of education" in Mexico. Given that Mexican migration has changed dramatically in recent years, the findings presented here provide a window for understanding how these changes in migration are reflected in adolescent goals and likely subsequent behavior.

Demography as a Field: Where We Came From and Where We Are Headed

This essay provides a series of reflections on the current state of demography as seen by four early-career researchers who are actively engaged in aspects of the discipline as varied as research, teaching, mentorship, data collection efforts, policy making, and policy advising. Despite some claims that the discipline is weakening, we showcase the great potential of the field and outline promising pathways and novel directions for the future. In so doing, we critically assess recent innovations in data quality and availability, stressing the need to "revolutionize" the way that demographic methods are taught by adopting a viewpoint that more closely reflects the rapidly changing, or "fast," nature of global social phenomena such as conflict-related displacements, environmental disasters, migration streams, pandemics, and evolving population policies. We conclude by discussing the relevance of careful demographic analyses for policy making, stressing three main points: (i) the need to make demography more visible and understandable to the public eye; (ii) the importance of engaging and co-creating with local communities to "break" the academic bubble; and (iii) the urge to counteract the spread of misinformation-a phenomenon that has become even more visible in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak.

PROTOCOL: Causal mechanisms linking education with fertility, HIV, and child mortality: A systematic review

In this review, we will investigate the pathways linking education and health to understand why education appears to improve health in some settings or among certain populations, and not in others, as well as to inform recommendations about how best to target investments in education to maximize the benefits to health. We will seek to answer the following key research questions, focusing specifically on the mechanisms that affect fertility, HIV, and infant and child mortality. If feasible, these answers will include meta-analyses of comparable education and mediator outcomes: (1) Do changes in education affect the primary theorized mediators (e.g., knowledge, attitudes, resources, and agency; health behaviors and harmful practices) of the relationship between education and fertility, HIV and child mortality? (2) How does the relationship between these mediators and education vary across different aspects of education (e.g., grade attainment vs. literacy/numeracy vs. attendance)?

Policies and interventions to remove gender-related barriers to girls' school participation and learning in low- and middle-income countries: A systematic review of the evidence

Background

Gender disparities in education continue to undermine girls' opportunities, despite enormous strides in recent years to improve primary enrolment and attainment for girls in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). At the regional, country and subnational levels gender gaps remain, with girls in many settings less likely to complete primary school, less likely to complete secondary, and often less likely to be literate than boys. The academic and policy literatures on the topic of gender-related barriers to girls' education are both extensive. However, there remain gaps in knowledge regarding which interventions are most likely to work in contexts with different combinations of barriers.

Objectives

This systematic review identified and assessed the strength of the evidence of interventions and exposures addressing gender-related barriers to schooling for girls in LMICs.

Search Methods

The AEA RCT Registry, Africa Bibliography, African Education Research Database, African Journals Online, DEC USAID, Dissertation Abstracts, EconLit, ELDIS, Evidence Hub, Global Index Medicus, IDEAS-Repec, Intl Clinical Trials Registry, NBER, OpenGrey, Open Knowledge Repository, POPLINE, PsychINFO, PubMed, Research for Development Outputs, ScienceDirect, Sociological Abstracts, Web of Science, as well as relevant organization websites were searched electronically in March and April of 2019. Further searches were conducted through review of bibliographies as well as through inquiries to authors of included studies, relevant researchers and relevant organizations, and completed in March 2020.

Selection Criteria

We included randomized controlled trials as well as quasi-experimental studies that used quantitative models that attempted to control for endogeneity. Manuscripts could be either published, peer-reviewed articles or grey literature such as working papers, reports and dissertations. Studies must have been published on or after 2000, employed an intervention or exposure that attempted to address a gender-related barrier to schooling, analyzed the effects of the intervention/exposure on at least one of our primary outcomes of interest, and utilized data from LMICs to be included.

Data Collection and Analysis

A team of reviewers was grouped into pairs to independently screen articles for relevance, extract data and assess risk of bias for each included study. A third reviewer assisted in resolving any disputes. Risk of bias was assessed either through the RoB 2 tool for experimental studies or the ROBINS-I tool for quasi-experimental studies. Due to the heterogeneity of study characteristics and reported outcome measures between studies, we applied the GRADE (Grading of Recommendation, Assessment, Development and Evaluation) approach adapted for situations where a meta-analysis is not possible to synthesize the research.

Results

Interventions rated as effective exist for three gender-related barriers: inability to afford tuition and fees, lack of adequate food, and insufficient academic support. Promising interventions exist for three gender-related barriers: inadequate school access, inability to afford school materials, and lack of water and sanitation. More research is needed for the remaining 12 gender-related barriers: lack of support for girls' education, child marriage and adolescent pregnancy, lack of information on returns to education/alternative roles for women, school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV), lack of safe spaces and social connections, inadequate sports programs for girls, inadequate health and childcare services, inadequate life skills, inadequate menstrual hygiene management (MHM), poor policy/legal environment, lack of teaching materials and supplies, and gender-insensitive school environment. We find substantial gaps in the evidence. Several gender-related barriers to girls' schooling are under-examined. For nine of these barriers we found fewer than 10 relevant evaluations, and for five of the barriers-child marriage and adolescent pregnancy, SRGBV, inadequate sports programs for girls, inadequate health and childcare services, and inadequate MHM-we found fewer than five relevant evaluations; thus, more research is needed to understand the most effective interventions to address many of those barriers. Also, nearly half of programs evaluated in the included studies were multi-component, and most evaluations were not designed to tease out the effects of individual components. As a result, even when interventions were effective overall, it is often difficult to identify how much, if any, of the impact is attributable to a given program component. The combination of components varies between studies, with few comparable interventions, further limiting our ability to identify packages of interventions that work well. Finally, the context-specific nature of these barriers-whether a barrier exists in a setting and how it manifests and operates-means that a program that is effective in one setting may not be effective in another.

Authors' Conclusions

While some effective and promising approaches exist to address gender-related barriers to education for girls, evidence gaps exist on more than half of our hypothesized gender-related barriers to education, including lack of support for girls' education, SRGBV, lack of safe spaces and social connections, inadequate life skills, and inadequate MHM, among others. In some cases, despite numerous studies examining interventions addressing a specific barrier, studies either did not disaggregate results by sex, or they were not designed to isolate the effects of each intervention component. Differences in context and in implementation, such as the number of program components, curricula content, and duration of interventions, also make it difficult to compare interventions to one another. Finally, few studies looked at pathways between interventions and education outcomes, so the reasons for differences in outcomes largely remain unclear.

Gifting Relationships and School Dropout in Rural Malawi: Examining Differences by Gender and Poverty Level

Research from sub‐Saharan Africa has shown the heightened likelihood of dropping out of school for students in sexual relationships, particularly girls. However, our knowledge is limited as to whether the risk of school dropout is exacerbated by the exchange of gifts in the relationship as well as students’ poverty level. Drawing on longitudinal survey data from rural Malawi, this study explores these questions, examining differences by gender and poverty level in the association between being in a sexual relationship in which gifts are exchanged and school dropout for adolescents in primary school. Our findings show that for both boys and girls, being in a gifting relationship heightens the risk of school dropout and eliminates the protective advantages of being nonpoor on dropout. However, non‐gifting sexual relationships also erase the protective advantage of being nonpoor for girls, but not for boys. These results point to the value of examining poverty–gender interactions to gain a more nuanced understanding of the impact of sexual relationships on adolescent trajectories.

Desired Fertility and Educational Aspirations: Adolescent Goals in Rapidly Changing Social Contexts

Objective

This article analyzes the relationship between educational aspirations and fertility aspirations early in the life course in three different settings.

Background

The negative relationship between women's educational attainment and childbearing is one of the most consistent associations in social science. Family scholars have a more limited understanding of the relationship between educational aspirations and fertility aspirations before childbearing or union formation.

Method

The authors use data collected in Jalisco, Mexico; Gaza, Mozambique; and Chitwan Valley, Nepal as part of the Family Migration and Early Life Outcomes project. They estimate nested Poisson regressions to model the relationship between adolescent educational aspirations and desired family size, controlling for individual- and household-level sociodemographic variables as well as adolescent beliefs and values.

Results

On average, adolescents who desire more education want fewer children in unadjusted models. In Mozambique and Nepal, this association is attenuated in models accounting for household characteristics. In Mexico, the association persists after incorporating these factors, but the inclusion of individual aspirations attenuates the relationship between educational aspirations and desired family size. In Mozambique, the association of educational aspirations with desired family size is moderated by gender.

Conclusion

As young people enter adolescence, their desires for education and childbearing are inversely related, but the mechanisms driving this association vary across contexts. This variation may be related to linkages between education, social status, and family values.

Economic Inequality and Divergence in Family Formation in sub-Saharan Africa

Economic inequality has been rising in many sub-Saharan African countries alongside rapid changes to union and family formation. In high-income countries marked by rising inequality, union and family formation practices have diverged across socioeconomic statuses, with intergenerational social and health consequences for the disadvantaged. In this study, we address whether there is also evidence of demographic divergence in low-income settings. Specifically, we model the age at first marriage and first birth by socioeconomic status groups for women born between 1960-1989 using Demographic and Health Survey data from twelve sub-Saharan African countries where economic inequality levels are relatively high or rising. We argue that economic and socio-cultural factors may both serve to increasingly delay marriage and childbearing for the elite as compared to others in the context of rising inequality. We find emerging social stratification in marriage and childbearing, and demonstrate that this demographic divergence is driven by the elites who are increasingly marrying and having children at later ages, with near stagnation in the age at first marriage and birth among the remaining majority. We urge further research at the intersection of socioeconomic and demographic inequality to inform necessary policy levers and curtail negative social and health consequences.

Whose bodies are they? Conceptualizing reproductive violence against adolescents in Ethiopia, Malawi and Zambia

We use a violence lens to visibilize how adolescents who sought abortion-related care in three African countries are coerced, controlled and punished with regards to their sexual and reproductive health. We suggest the use of the concept of reproductive violence to characterize these diverse experiences. Our data comes from a comparative study on adolescent contraceptive and abortion seeking behaviours in Ethiopia, Malawi and Zambia. We conducted 313 interviews that generated both quantitative and qualitative evidence in each country (2018 - 2019). Our analysis shows how adolescent bodies are subject to reproductive violence by parents, partners and healthcare workers, situated within a broader framework of structural violence. Reproductive violence manifests in multiple ways, often within a single abortion trajectory, including coercion to accept post-abortion contraception after receiving facility-based abortion services; having few to no choices of contraceptive methods prior to or after pregnancy; parents and relatives coercing adolescents to not/use abortion or contraception; lack of decision-making regarding sexuality or sexual identity; sex and contraceptive use in relationships rooted in gendered and power dynamics with partners; and - ultimately - adolescents' lack of control over their own bodies. We show how these experiences make adolescents vulnerable to the experience and perpetuation of reproductive violence.

Premarital Fertility and Marital Timing in Malawi

In Malawi, Africa, the median age at first marriage is among the lowest on the continent and adolescent fertility rates are among the highest. Using high-frequency panel data from the country designed to follow single women and men into marriage, we examine the extent to which premarital fertility is associated with the timing of marriage. Two notable findings emerge. First, premarital fertility typically leads to a more rapid transition into marriage, compared to not having had a premarital conception or birth, and this effect is as strong for men as it is for women. Second, among women with premarital fertility, those who are wealthier, and those who have two parents alive, have lower odds of not marrying. Among men with premarital fertility, however, no patterns predict their subsequent marital outcomes. This study contributes to the literature on fertility and marriage in sub-Saharan Africa by including men in the analysis.

The Mental Map of National Hierarchy in Europe

We theorize that people's perceptions of national hierarchy are aligned not only with longstanding cultural schemas of development but also with schemas of cultural wealth. We use data from the Nation Brands Index surveys to examine how European publics' evaluate their own country and other European countries across many attributes. We find that European publics rank northwest European countries highest on developmental attributes and southwestern European nations highest on cultural attributes, while they rank eastern European countries lowest in both categorizations. Moreover, we show that publics' rankings of countries load to two related yet distinct factors, the contents of which closely reflect schemas of development and cultural wealth. This evidence suggests that these two distinct schemas are simultaneously present in Europeans' perceptions of national hierarchy.

Does schooling protect sexual health? The association between three measures of education and STIs among adolescents in Malawi

While multiple studies have documented shifting educational gradients in HIV prevalence, less attention has been given to the effect of school participation and academic skills on infection during adolescence. Using the Malawi Schooling and Adolescent Study, a longitudinal survey that followed 2,649 young people aged 14-17 at baseline from 2007 to 2013, we estimate the effect of three education variables: school enrolment, grade attainment, and academic skills-numeracy and Chichewa literacy-on herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) and HIV incidence using interval-censored survival analysis. We find that grade attainment is significantly associated with lower rates of both HSV-2 and HIV among girls, and is negatively associated with HSV-2 but not HIV among boys. School enrolment and academic skills are not significantly associated with sexually transmitted infections (STIs) for boys or girls in our final models. Efforts to encourage school progression in high-prevalence settings in sub-Saharan Africa could well reduce, or at least postpone, acquisition of STIs.

How plans change: Anticipation, interferences and unpredictabilities

The purpose of this article is to examine the way in which individuals consider their futures, what happens to these anticipations over time and where the unpredictabilities that disrupt the realization of these expectations are located. These reflections are based on a qualitative longitudinal survey conducted over 20 years (1995-2015) with six waves, among a panel of young people entering adult life in Normandy (France). I propose to explore empirically why their anticipations frequently remain unrealized and what factors intervened in a predictable or unpredictable way and diverted the life course from what had been anticipated. We will then see that these changes are due mainly to the interdependencies between the different levels and domains of life and to the effects of time which produces synchronizations, shifts and coincidences between these levels and domains. The interdependencies apply not only to lives following their course, but also to the turning points that brought them to change direction. It becomes crucial to take into consideration theoretically and empirically the disruptions that occur over the life course rather than considering individuals' lives as following simple linear trajectories. The analysis of turning points highlights the relevant elements of the life course, the decisive factors and the changes in priority, which are made more conscious and explicit by the respondents than in more stable sequences. A lifecourse theory must integrate these unpredictabilities, interferences and reorientations which are part of the complex processes at stake.

Lusting, learning and lasting in school: sexual debut, school performance and dropout among adolescents in primary schools in Karonga district, northern Malawi

Age at sexual debut is known to have implications for future sexual behaviours and health outcomes, including HIV infection, early pregnancy and maternal mortality, but may also influence educational outcomes. Longitudinal data on schooling and sexual behaviour from a demographic surveillance site in Karonga district, northern Malawi, were analysed for 3153 respondents between the ages of 12 and 25 years to examine the association between sexual debut and primary school dropout, and the role of prior school performance. Time to dropout was modelled using the Fine and Gray survival model to account for the competing event of primary school completion. To deal with the time-varying nature of age at sexual debut and school performance, models were fitted using landmark analyses. Sexual debut was found to be associated with a five-fold increase in rate of subsequent dropout for girls and a two-fold increase in dropout rate for boys (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR] of 5.27, CI 4.22-6.57, and 2.19, CI 1.77-2.7, respectively). For girls who were sexually active by age 16, only 16% ultimately completed primary schooling, compared with 70% aged 18 or older at sexual debut. Prior to sexual debut, girls had primary completion levels similar to those of boys. The association between sexual debut and school dropout could not be explained by prior poor school performance: the effect of sexual debut on dropout was as strong among those who were not behind in school as among those who were overage for their school grade. Girls who were sexually active were more likely to repeat a grade, with no effect being seen for boys. Pathways to dropout are complex and may differ for boys and girls. Interventions are needed to improve school progression so children complete primary school before sexual debut, and to improve sex education and contraception provision.

Tsogolo la Thanzi: A Longitudinal Study of Young Adults Living in Malawi's HIV Epidemic

Tsogolo la Thanzi (TLT) was designed to study how young adults navigate sexual relationships and childbearing during a generalized HIV epidemic. TLT began in 2009 with a population-representative sample of 1,505 women and 574 men between the ages of 15 and 25 living in Balaka, southern Malawi, where regional adult HIV prevalence then stood at 15 percent. The first phase (2009-11) included a series of eight interviews, spaced four months apart. During this time, women's romantic and sexual partners enrolled in the study on an ongoing basis. A refresher sample of 315 women was added in 2012. Seventy-eight percent of respondents were re-interviewed in the second phase of TLT (2015), which consisted of follow-up interviews approximately 3.5 years after the previous interview (ages 21-31). At each wave, detailed information about fertility intentions and behaviors, relationships, sexual behavior, health, and a range of sociodemographic and economic traits was gathered by means of face-to-face surveys. Biomarkers for HIV and pregnancy were also collected. Distinguishing features include: a population-representative sample, closely spaced data collection, dyadic data on couples over time, and an experimental approach to HIV testing and counseling. Data are available through restricted data-user agreements managed by Data Sharing for Demographic Research (DSDR) at the University of Michigan.

The Implicit Activation Mechanism of Culture: A Survey Experiment on Associations with Childbearing

This paper proposes a mechanism by which exposure to forms of culture "in the world" activates individuals' cognitive associations beneath conscious awareness, making certain behaviors more likely. A survey experiment illustrates part of the proposed mechanism, testing whether cues that make salient a shared cultural representation affect the activation of individuals' associations with childbearing. Drawing on cultural beliefs regarding the ostensible contradiction between close relations and monetary exchange, we expect that making one of these spheres salient would inhibit activation of associations with the other sphere. As predicted, respondents randomly assigned to a cue regarding family have fewer associations between childbearing and finances. We demonstrate the relevance of these findings to respondents' fertility desires, a measure connected to behavior. We discuss the conditions under which this mechanism may exert the most influence on behavior and outline key future research questions that the proposed model introduces.