Sending children to school: rural livelihoods and parental investment in education in northern Tanzania
Sending children to school: rural livelihoods and parental investment in education in northern Tanzania
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DOI：
10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.10.001
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发表时间：
2016-03-01
影响因子：
5.1
通讯作者：
Lawson, David W.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hedges, Sophie;Mulder, Monique Borgerhoff;Lawson, David W.
人口转变的进化和经济模型认为，经济发展激励低生育率、高投资的育儿策略，而且这种策略首先出现在正在经历“现代化”的人口中相对富裕的家庭。然而，大多数研究侧重于降低生育率，而不是转移父母的投资，很少有研究考虑父母关于教育投资的决定与替代农村生计有何不同。利用来自19个村庄和1,719名儿童(7-19岁)的数据，我们调查了生计、财富和儿童特征多样化对坦桑尼亚农村教育投资的多种衡量标准的影响。牧民家庭(主要是马赛族)的孩子上学的可能性最小，而邻近的农民和企业主在教育上的投资更多。以资产所有权衡量的家庭财富也独立地与所有生计类型的教育投资呈正相关。这些结果与相对劳动力市场一体化和富裕家庭较低的机会成本和较高的教育经济回报是一致的。然而，在牧民中，畜牧业持有的财富与教育投资无关，这一结果可能反映了与畜牧业对童工的需求相关的机会成本上升。我们发现女性在教育方面处于边缘优势，这是令人惊讶的，因为该区域的定性研究和许多发展项目强调了女孩面临的劣势。我们还发现了后生劣势的提示性证据(即在统计学上具有显着性)，这与家庭资源顺序稀释的预测结果一致。女性的优势和后生的劣势在最富有的家庭中尤为明显。富裕家庭在教育回报方面的可靠性更高，可能会倾向于优待那些认为长期回报更高的孩子，而对相对贫穷家庭的所有孩子进行平等但水平较低的投资，可能反映了一种押注对冲策略。我们根据父母投资理论和关于人口转变的更广泛的文献来讨论我们的结果。(C)2016年提交人。由爱思唯尔公司出版。这是一篇基于CC by License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).的开放获取文章
Evolutionary and economic models of the demographic transition argue that economic development incentivizes low-fertility, high-investment parental strategies, and that such strategies emerge first in relatively wealthy families within populations undergoing 'modernization'. However, most research focuses on fertility reduction rather than shifting parental investment, and few studies consider how parental decisions regarding educational investment vary in relation to alternative rural livelihoods. Using data from 19 villages and 1,719 children (7-19 years), we investigate the effects of diversifying livelihoods, wealth and child characteristics on multiple measures of educational investment in rural Tanzania. Children in (predominantly Maasai) pastoralist households were the least likely to attend school, while neighboring farmers and business owners invested more in education. Household wealth, as measured by asset ownership, was also independently positively associated with educational investment for all livelihood types. These results are consistent with lower opportunity costs and greater perceived economic pay-offs to education for relatively labor market-integrated and wealthy households. However, among pastoralists wealth held in livestock was not associated with educational investment This result may reflect elevated opportunity costs related to the child labor demands of livestock herding. We find a marginal female advantage in education, which is surprising because qualitative research and numerous development projects in the region emphasize the disadvantages facing girls. We also find suggestive evidence of a later-born disadvantage (i.e. borderline statistically significant) consistent with the predicted consequences of sequential household resource dilution. Female advantage and later-born disadvantage were particularly evident in the wealthiest households. Greater reliability in the returns to education for wealthy households may favor preferential treatment of children with higher perceived long-term payoffs, while equal but lower-level investment in all children in relatively poor families may reflect a bet-hedging strategy. We discuss our results in light of parental investment theory and the wider literature on the demographic transition. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).