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

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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.