5-Iodotubercidin cost Extending this multinational evidence

Extending this multinational evidence linking parental divorce and children’s health disadvantage, we ask whether this association is uniform or if it 5-Iodotubercidin cost varies across the subcontinent—specifically, according to the commonality of divorce. Studies of Europe have found that the societal level and acceptability of divorce strongly shape how consequential divorce is for individuals’ well-being (Kalmijn & Uunk, 2007; Kalmijn, 2009; Soons & Kalmijn, 2009). The tremendous variation in the prevalence of divorce across Africa motivates our interest in assessing the relevance of these findings to the African context. At the country level, for example, over 40% of first unions end in divorce within 20 years in Central African Republic, Congo (Brazzaville), and Liberia, compared to fewer than 10% in Mali (Clark & Brauner-Otto, 2015). Within countries there are also striking differences in the commonality of divorce. In Malawi, for instance, the probability of divorce for women in the northern region is nearly one half of what it is for women in the southern region (Reniers, 2003).
Parental divorce and childhood health in sub-saharan Africa
Discussion Researchers increasingly recognize that having divorced parents is a marker of childhood health risks in sub-Saharan Africa, including lower levels of survival (Chae, 2013; Clark et al., 2013; Thiombiano et al., 2013). Given the tremendous variation in the prevalence of divorce across the subcontinent, we expand this burgeoning literature by investigating whether the magnitude of this disadvantage varies by the commonality of divorce in a child’s local context. To do so, we pooled data from 31 African countries and leveraged heterogeneity in the prevalence of currently divorced women across 290 subnational regions. Results confirm that although having a divorced mother is generally associated with an elevated risk of morbidity and mortality in early childhood, relative to children with monogamously married mothers, the size of the disparity varies by the level of divorce in a child’s local subnational region. In subnational regions where less than 1 percent of women are currently divorced, children with divorced mothers have a 20 percent higher rate ratio of childhood morbidity and a 40 percent larger risk of mortality—a level of disadvantage that dwarfs that of children with divorced mothers residing in regions where one in every five women are currently divorced. Although we cannot fully rule out that these associations are spuriously driven, we find no evidence that these cross-contextual differences are due to socioeconomic disadvantage in regions with fewer divorced women. Similarly, we find no evidence that the selection of high-conflict marriages into divorce where organ systems is less common drives the finding. The variable nature of the size of the association between parental divorce and children’s health across sub-Saharan Africa’s diverse subnational regions raises the question of why divorce is associated with such worse child health profiles in African regions where fewer women are divorced. In fact, we find that children with divorced mothers experience worse outcomes in regions where divorce is less prevalent, compared to their peers with married parents, despite their mothers having relatively higher educational attainment and living in relatively wealthier households. Of course, data limitations restrict our ability to confirm that the variation remains net of socioeconomic factors. For instance, living in a wealthier household does not guarantee greater access to resources, and this single measure of household wealth tells us little about the financial turmoil following divorce. Thus, future research needs to examine the economic circumstances of divorced mothers where divorce is rare with richer data, and to confirm whether economic factors contribute to their children’s higher risk of experiencing poor health outcomes. As discussed, another possibility is that the dampened association between parental divorce and children’s health in settings where there are more divorced women is due to the limited social and psychological costs of divorce in these contexts. Implicit in this idea is that individuals are especially receptive to divorce in these settings; however, we are not aware of any study that confirms this is the case specifically in the African context. Thus, in supplemental analyses (not shown but available upon request) we used World Values Survey (WVS) data to confirm that the prevalence of divorce is systematically associated with attitudes toward it at the aggregate level. In these analyses, we used the fact that the WVS and DHS were collected in Zambia—a southern African country—in the same year. Merging WVS and DHS data, we find a strong positive correlation between the proportion of people in Zambian regions who believe that divorce is “always justifiable” and the percentage of divorced women (r=.73; p<.05; authors’ calculation). This finding provides preliminary support for the idea that social environment could be a key driver of the cross-contextual variation in the childhood disadvantages associated with divorce. Moreover, the fact that the prevalence of divorce also suppresses the morbidity risk associated with having a never-married mother (see Table 4) further supports the notion that a larger number of divorced women reflects a cultural and social context that is more favorable to single mothers.