Collaborative Research: The Anthropology of Demographic Transition and Livelihood Diversification

该项目由SBE的建立和拓宽3.0计划和既定的激励竞争研究计划(EPSCoR)共同资助。在过去的几十年里，人类家庭的平均规模急剧下降。这影响到家庭满足家庭需要的能力以及扮演不同生存角色的家庭成员的福利。鉴于这种人口结构转变对个人、家庭和社会福祉的影响，对家庭规模的变化进行了深入的研究，但仍然没有得到很好的解决，特别是在相对较大的家庭规模仍然正常的情况下。本研究项目使用文化和生物人类学的理论来理解生计多样化在混合(自给自足和市场经济)经济中可能在扩大家庭规模方面所起的作用。它在为少数群体服务的机构和研究密集型机构之间建立了新的合作关系，为本科生和研究生提供重要的、全额报酬的培训机会，包括在实地、实验室和计算方法方面，并支持职业生涯早期和代表性不足的学者。该项目通过学术演讲和出版物以及各种面向公众的媒体，向利益攸关方社区以及学术和非学术受众广泛传播成果。该项目检验了这样一种假设，即在混合经济背景下，生计多样化的需要与更多的家庭规模有关，而不是在人口结构转型的典型模式下预测的家庭规模。它的第一个目标是测试经济和文化因素是否以及如何影响理想和实现的家庭规模。它的第二个目的是调查家庭规模如何影响儿童的日常活动，包括生产性和消费性活动，以及活动概况如何影响儿童的营养、能量、身体健康和幸福感。为此，调查人员从居住在市场一体化、混合型和自给自足经济体中的儿童中收集大样本数据，包括从社会人口调查问卷中提取的数据，这些问卷描述了生计和围绕家庭规模、体力活动和饮食记录的文化规范，以及对健康的人体测量和生物标记物评估。总而言之，这些数据为家庭规模变化的模式、原因和后果提供了更详细的评估，这些变化受到经济和文化因素的影响。因此，结果通过关注家庭调整生存战略以适应经济和文化景观变化的最近的手段，从而为人口转变理论中缺失的方面提供信息。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project is jointly funded by SBE's Build and Broaden 3.0 program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). The average size of human families has dropped dramatically over the last several decades. This affects families’ abilities to meet household needs and the welfare of family members adopting different subsistence roles. Given the implications of such demographic transitions for individual, family, and societal well-being, changes in family size have been intensively studied, and yet remain poorly resolved, particularly within contexts where relatively large family sizes remain normative. This research project uses theory from cultural and biological anthropology to understand the role that livelihood diversification may play in driving family size in mixed (subsistence and market) economies. It creates new collaborations among minority-serving institutions and research-intensive institutions, offers significant, fully remunerated training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, including in field, laboratory, and computational methods, and supports both early career and underrepresented scholars. It disseminates results broadly to stakeholder communities and to academic and non-academic audiences via scholarly presentations and publications and a variety of public-oriented media outlets.This project tests the hypothesis that the need to diversify livelihoods in contexts with mixed economies is associated with larger family sizes than are predicted under typical models of demographic transition. Its first objective is to test whether and how economic and cultural factors influence ideal and realized family sizes. Its second is to investigate how family size affects children’s daily activities, both productive and consumptive, and how activity profiles influence children’s nutrition, energetics, physical fitness, and well-being. To do so, investigators collect data from a large sample of children residing in market-integrated, mixed, and subsistence economies, including data drawn from socio-demographic questionnaires that characterize livelihoods and cultural norms surrounding family size, physical activity and dietary logs, and anthropometric and biomarker assessments of health. Together, these data provide a much more detailed assessment of the patterns, causes, and consequences of family size variation as affected by variation in economic and cultural factors. Results thus inform missing aspects of demographic transition theory by focusing on the proximate means by which families adjust subsistence strategies to accommodate variation in economic and cultural landscapes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.