David Bishai
Uganda
School of Arts and Sciences, Bachelor's program
This research project will identify polygynous households in the rural Iganga and Mayuge districts of Uganda to learn how different types of unions affect investment in child health and well-being.
Background. Marriage unions have biomedical, psychosocial, and economic significance.Familial relationships affect sexual and mental health, child welfare, disease transmission, nutrition, and other outcomes. Households are also important units of economic production, especially in the rural developing world. Marriage creates social capital; the net income or value of marriage is expected to be larger than the sum of spouses’ single incomes (Becker, 83). Family structure affects health through physical and social contact as well as through the accumulation and allocation of resources. Research on families and marriage can help marginalized, at-risk subpopulations such as women and children. The family and marriages are thus important loci for public health intervention and study.
Polygyny, in which a man has more than one wife, is a category of polygamy, the practice of having more than one spouse concurrently. The existence of polygyny across different ethnic and religious groups suggests some economic and population-based origins. Anthropologists have theorized that cultures’ rates of polygyny are affected by factors such as sexual division of labor, crop types, climate conditions, bridewealth payments, pathogen stress, and nutritional stress (Bretschneider, 183). Marriage is influenced by and influences human ecology. Union type may correlate to certain health risks. Studies of Rwandan nuptiality show that non-monogamous relationships are related to increased HIV seropositivity relative to monogamous relationships, although this includes formal and informal unions. Polygamy may intensify STI risk factors such as accumulation of several sexual partners and women’s likelihood of having been in other unions (Bledsoe & Pison, 269).
The economist Gary Becker models the economics of polygyny in A Treatise on the Family. Becker theorizes that as the index of polygyny (male polygamy) increases, male resources invested in children decrease. This is because polygynous men allocate resources towards the search for new wives instead of investing that amount in children. They are therefore pursuing a strategy of quantity rather than quality maximization of children (Bishai & Bradley). According to Becker, monogamous men would face lower mating costs, allowing more resources to be allocated to children. An alternative theory is that monogamous men are would-be polygamists, and still devote resources to the search for a second wife. Becker’s theory is the theoretical basis for this study, conducted by Dr. David Bishai, Associate Professor in the Department of Population and Family Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The research will be conducted in the Iganga district of Uganda, and will test part of Becker’s theory on polygyny. If polygynous and monogamous men have different reproductive strategies, women who marry polygynous men might be older or have a wider age gap them women who marry men who remain monogamous for their lives (Bishai & Bradley). If polygyny results in low paternal investment per child, time investments in children by polygynous men should be lower when controlling for household size (Bishai & Bradley). This study will benefit communities in Iganga and Mayuge districts indirectly; increased understanding about how marital practices affect child health and well-being could inform Uganda’s national marriage policy and future interventions. Revisions to Uganda’s Marriage Act have been stalled in parliament for the last 10 years. Although many of the political disagreements pertain to ensuring that ethnic minorities marital practices are respected, the government is in need of empirical research on how various ethnic marital practices affect the well-being of children. We hope this research will be a step forward in this direction.
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