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与儿童福祉之间关系的科学认识。 令人惊讶的是，尽管建立了良好的联系，我们仍然对社会关系的组织和内容如何以及为什么塑造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巨大差异，制定将家庭组织与向儿童转移资源联系起来的机制。 研究小组将采用生命历程的方法，收集以儿童为中心的生活安排、社会关系和资源转移的背景数据，以及家庭内部和家庭之间差异的原因。 方法将包括生活史的收集，以及深入访谈，个案研究，并参与观察集中在两个低地社区。 最近对美国家庭的研究表明，生物学上的亲缘关系可能对向儿童转移资源很重要。 我们评估的普遍性，这一发现，竞争的解释，探索他们在莱索托，非洲环境的特点是复杂多样的生活安排，在那里有人认为，扩大亲属为儿童提供了一个安全网的可解释性。 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。这一流行病造成的破坏因长期贫困和最近的干旱而进一步加剧。 更好地了解向儿童转移资源所依据的社会进程，有望为旨在促进莱索托和其他处于这种危机中的国家儿童福利的政策提供信息。更广泛地说，这个项目将有助于我们了解在家庭破裂时促进儿童恢复力的因素，并在这样做的过程中，进一步划定家庭机构作为社会福利提供者的界限。 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.