Collaborative Research: The Anthropology of Demographic Transition and Livelihood Diversification

About This Grant

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.