IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v37y1993i11p1367-1376.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Family composition strategies in rural north India

Author

Listed:
  • Wadley, Susan S.

Abstract

Recent evidence on child mortality and fertility trends in the community known as Karimpur in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh presents a troubling puzzle: the female children of the poor are now dying at a much more rapid rate than their brothers. In this community, sex-specific child mortality is not new. What is new is the increasing female bias in child mortality among the poor. My contention is that this trend can only be understood in the larger context of family composition strategies, strategies which have changed due to the socio-economic changes wrought by the green revolution and other development programs of the past 25 years. Moreover, mortality cannot be understood without also considering fertility behavior and the overall shape of the resulting families. My hypothesis is that the Karimpur poor are using high fertility and sex-specific child mortality to maximize the number of surviving males in attempting to insure family welfare.

Suggested Citation

  • Wadley, Susan S., 1993. "Family composition strategies in rural north India," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 37(11), pages 1367-1376, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:37:y:1993:i:11:p:1367-1376
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(93)90167-3
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Asfaw, Abay & Klasen, Stephan & Lamanna, Francesca, 2007. "Intra-household Gender Disparities in Children’s Medical Care before Death in India," IZA Discussion Papers 2586, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Rubiana Chamarbagwala, 2011. "Sibling composition and selective gender-based survival bias," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 24(3), pages 935-955, July.
    3. Patra, Nilanjan, 2008. "State-wise pattern of gender bias in child health in India," MPRA Paper 21435, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Jackson, Cecile, 1996. "Rescuing gender from the poverty trap," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 24(3), pages 489-504, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    fertility mortality India women;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:37:y:1993:i:11:p:1367-1376. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.