Sex Ratios and Family Life in China

描述（申请人提供）：长期以来的重男轻女文化以及独生子女生育政策的大部分成功实施，与更直接的因素，特别是性别选择性堕胎技术的广泛应用相结合，造成了近几十年来中国女孩的惊人短缺。随着这些群体的年龄增长，中国将很快经历成年男性相对于成年女性的戏剧性过剩。许多观察家认为，这些性别比例失衡的潜在后果是深刻而深远的。我们建议研究中国成年人性别比例失衡对家庭生活四个维度的影响：家庭形成行为（包括结婚年龄，离婚的可能性，以及年龄，教育和社会背景的自愿交配）;妇女的社会经济地位（包括他们的教育和职业成就以及劳动力参与）;性行为（包括首次性交的年龄和婚前及婚外性交）;家庭内部动态（包括家庭劳动分工、婚姻质量和承诺以及家庭暴力）。我们的概念框架是建立在有影响力但仍有争议的理论基础上的，这些理论将倾斜的性别比例与家庭相关的人口行为以及女性和男性的家庭和经济角色和地位联系起来。我们计划使用最近的中国健康和家庭生活调查（CHFLS）的数据来测试从这些和其他理论角度得出的假设，CHFLS是一项大型的，具有全国代表性的中国成年人调查，我们将附加来自中国人口普查的信息，描述当地居民社区中女性和男性的相对数量。通过利用中国各地成年性别比的巨大地理差异，并应用适用于多层数据结构分析的统计技术，拟议的分析有望大幅提高我们对中国男性相对于女性日益过剩将如何影响的理解家庭生活的多个维度。公共卫生相关性：中国性别比例失衡的加剧有可能改变家庭生活的多个层面，并由此改变这个世界上人口最多的国家的身心健康。因此，更多地了解中国男性过剩和女性不足对家庭的影响是一个重要的科学目标。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A longstanding cultural preference for sons over daughters and the largely successful imposition of a one-child fertility policy have converged with more proximate factors, particularly the widespread availability of sex-selective abortion technology, to create an astounding shortage of girls in China over recent decades. As these cohorts age, China will soon experience a dramatic overabundance of adult males relative to adult females. The potential consequences of these imbalanced sex ratios are thought by many observers to be profound and far-reaching. We propose to examine the impact of imbalanced adult sex ratios on four dimensions of family life in China: family formation behavior (including age at marriage, likelihood of divorce, and assortative mating by age, education, and social background); women's socioeconomic status (including their educational and occupational attainment and labor force participation); sexual behavior (including age at first sexual intercourse and engagement in premarital and extramarital intercourse); and internal family dynamics (including the division of household labor, marital quality and commitment, and domestic violence). Our conceptual framework is grounded in influential but still controversial theories linking skewed sex ratios to family-related demographic behavior and to women's and men's familial and economic roles and statuses. We plan to test hypotheses drawn from these and other theoretical perspectives using data from the recent Chinese Health and Family Life Survey (CHFLS), a large, nationally-representative survey of Chinese adults, to which we will append information from Chinese censuses describing the relative numbers of women and men in their local residential community. By capitalizing on the substantial geographic variation in adult sex ratios across China, and by applying statistical techniques appropriate for the analysis of multilevel data structures, the proposed analysis holds promise for substantially enhancing our understanding of how China's increasing overabundance of males relative to females will affect multiple dimensions of family life. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Growing imbalances in China's sex ratio have the potential to alter substantially multiple dimensions of family life and, through this, the physical and mental health of the world's most populous nation. Therefore, learning more about the family-related impacts of China's male surplus and female deficit is an important scientific objective.