Family Disruption, Family Response: Social Change, Family Organization, and Child Well-being in Southern Africa

该项目旨在提高对家庭组织和儿童福祉之间关系的科学理解。令人惊讶的是，尽管已经建立了良好的联系，但我们仍然对社会关系的组织和内容如何以及为什么会影响儿童的结果知之甚少。该项目利用莱索托家庭破裂造成的家庭组织的重大变化，详细阐述了将家庭组织和向儿童的资源转移联系起来的机制。采用生命历程方法，研究团队将收集以儿童为中心的情景数据，包括生活安排、社会关系和资源转移，以及家庭内部和家庭之间差异的原因。方法将包括收集生活史，以及以两个低地社区为重点的深入访谈、案例研究和参与者观察。最近对美国家庭的研究表明，生物亲缘关系可能对将资源转移给儿童很重要。我们评估了这一发现以及相互矛盾的解释在莱索托的可信性，莱索托是一个以复杂多样的生活安排为特征的非洲环境，在那里，大家庭为儿童提供了一个安全网。莱索托是世界上全国成人艾滋病毒感染率超过30%的四个国家之一。长期贫困和最近的干旱进一步加剧了这一流行病造成的破坏。更好地了解将资源转移给儿童的社会进程有望为旨在促进莱索托和处于这种危机中的其他国家的儿童福利的政策提供参考。更广泛地说，这个项目将有助于我们理解促进儿童=S在家庭破裂时的韧性的因素，并通过这样做，进一步划定家庭机构作为社会福利提供者的边界。这项研究得到了NSF社会学项目和NSF国际科学与工程办公室的支持。

This project is designed to improve scientific understanding of the connection between family organization and child well-being. Surprisingly, despite the well-established connection, we continue to know little about how and why the organization and content of social ties shape child outcomes. This project uses the significant variation in family organization created by family disruption in Lesotho to elaborate mechanisms linking family organization and resource transfers to children. Adopting a life course approach, the research team will collect contextualized, child-centered data on living arrangements, social ties, and resource transfers, and the reasons for their variation within and across families. Methods will include the collection of life histories, as well as in-depth interviews, case studies, and participant observation focused on two lowland communities. Recent research with U.S. families has suggested that biological relatedness may be important to the transfer of resources to children. We assess the generalizability of this finding, and that of competing explanations, by exploring their plausibility in Lesotho, an African setting characterized by complex and varied living arrangements, where it has been argued that extended kin provide a safety net for children. Lesotho is one of four countries in the world where national adult HIV prevalence exceeds 30%. The devastation created by this epidemic is further compounded by long-term poverty and recent drought. A better understanding of the social processes that underlie resource transfers to children promises to inform policies designed to promote the welfare of children in Lesotho, and other countries in the midst of such crises. More generally, this project will contribute to our understanding of the factors that promote children=s resilience in times of family disruption, and in so doing, further delineate the boundaries of the family institution as a social welfare provider. This research is supported by NSF's Sociology program and NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering.