Collaborative Research: The Anthropology of Demographic Transition and Livelihood Diversification

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和从事不同谋生工作的家庭成员的福利。鉴于这种人口转变对个人、家庭和社会福祉的影响，家庭规模的变化已经得到了深入研究，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是规范的背景下。本研究项目利用文化和生物人类学的理论来理解生计多样化在混合（自给和市场）经济中可能在推动家庭规模方面发挥的作用。它在少数族裔服务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了重要的、全额报酬的培训机会，包括实地、实验室和计算方法方面的培训，并为早期职业和代表性不足的学者提供支持。它通过学术报告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结果。该项目检验了这样一种假设，即在混合经济背景下，生计多样化的需求与家庭规模大于典型人口转型模型所预测的规模有关。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。第二个是调查家庭规模如何影响儿童的日常活动，包括生产活动和消费活动，以及活动概况如何影响儿童的营养、能量、身体健康和福祉。为此，调查人员从生活在市场一体化、混合和自给经济中的大量儿童样本中收集数据，包括从社会人口调查问卷中提取的数据，这些问卷描述了围绕家庭规模、身体活动和饮食记录以及人体测量学和生物标志物健康评估的生计和文化规范。综上所述，这些数据对受经济和文化因素影响的家庭规模变化的模式、原因和后果提供了更为详细的评估。因此，通过关注家庭调整生存策略以适应经济和文化景观变化的近似手段，结果为人口转型理论的缺失方面提供了信息。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.