Religious Involvement Is Associated With Higher Fertility and Lower Maternal Investment, but More Alloparental Support Among Gambian Mothers

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F25840886%3A_____%2F24%3AN0000017" target="_blank" >RIV/25840886:_____/24:N0000017 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajhb.24144" target="_blank" >https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajhb.24144</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.24144" target="_blank" >10.1002/ajhb.24144</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Religious Involvement Is Associated With Higher Fertility and Lower Maternal Investment, but More Alloparental Support Among Gambian Mothers

Original language description

Objectives Human childrearing is cooperative, with women often able to achieve relatively high fertility through help from many individuals. Previous work has documented tremendous socioecological variation in who supports women in childrearing, but less is known about the intracultural correlates of variation in allomaternal support. In the highly religious, high-fertility setting of The Gambia, we studied whether religious mothers have more children and receive more support with their children. Methods We randomly sampled 395 mothers and 745 focal children enrolled in the Kiang West (The Gambia) Longitudinal Population Study cohort. Structured interviews asked mothers who and how often people invest in their children, and about their religious practices. Data were collected at participants' homes on electronic tablet-based long-form surveys and analyzed using the Bayesian hierarchical models. Results Religiosity was weakly associated with women's higher age-adjusted fertility. Maternal religiosity was negatively related to maternal investment in focal children, but positively associated with total allomaternal support. Specifically, a woman's religiosity was positively associated with allomaternal support from matrilineal kin, other offspring, and affinal kin, but unrelated to paternal, patrilineal, and non-kin investment. Conclusions These results suggest that higher fertility among religious mothers may be supported by high levels of investment from biological and affinal kin. Matrilineal kin, other siblings, and affinal kin seem to be the most responsive to a woman's religiosity. Our findings cast doubt on interpretations of women's religious behaviors as signals of fidelity, and instead suggest they may be part of strategies to enable collective allomaternal resources and higher relative fertility.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

50402 - Demography

Project

—

Continuities

N - Vyzkumna aktivita podporovana z neverejnych zdroju

Publication year

2024

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

American Journal of Human Biology

ISSN

1042-0533

e-ISSN

1520-6300

Volume of the periodical

36

Issue of the periodical within the volume

12

Country of publishing house

US - UNITED STATES

Number of pages

15

Pages from-to

1-15

UT code for WoS article

001293372900001

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85201536661