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CePoD at PAA: Boaventura Cau wins poster award (JPG file)!

CePoD student Boaventura Cau won an award for his poster (JPG file): "Labor Migration, Spousal Communication and HIV/STD Risk Perceptions and Prevention."

LEFT: Judges present PAA poster award to CePoD student Boaventura Cau

Other CePoD members presenting at the Population Association of America 2008 Annual Meetings in New Orleans include faculty affiliates Victor Agadjanian, Mary Benin, Jennifer Glick, Steven Haas, Sarah Hayford, Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld, Eileen Diaz McConnell, and Scott Yabiku, and students Winfred Avogo, Littisha Bates, PremChand Dommaraju, Leah Rolfsen, Arusyak Sevoyan, and Li Zhu. See complete list of PAA presentations by CePoD members (Word file).

Premchand Dommaraju wins post-doctoral fellowship

Prremchand Dommaraju is the recipient of a competitive one year renewable Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (www.ari.nus.edu.sg). These positions are intended for outstanding active researchers from both the Asian region and the world, to bring to completion an important program of research in the social sciences and humanities. Prem’s proposed work for the fellowship will explore various dimensions of marriage change in India, their causes and consequences (mainly childbearing).

Scott Yabiku receives NIH grant

Scott Yabiku is the PI on a recent 2 year R03 grant from NICHD, entitled “School Characteristics and Marriage Timing in a Setting of Rapid Social Change.” The proposed research will study education and marital change in Nepal. The abstract is below.

One of the most notable marriage trends in rapidly changing societies is the trend toward marriages that are delayed relative to historical norms. Education is frequently invoked as a primary cause behind these trends. In addition, some studies have examined the context of educational opportunity by measuring the presence of schools in a community and how far away these schools are from focal individuals. While these studies offer useful insight into the role of educational institutions in a community, they have tended to overlook important variation in the schools' institutional characteristics. These limitations in prior studies prevent the testing of theoretical issues of how schools are related to individuals' family formation. This is an important omission because different characteristics of schools are likely to be associated with different mechanisms and consequences for individuals' marriage timing. This proposed project has three specific research goals. 1) To examine the relationship between multiple dimensions of school characteristics and marriage timing. Although prior research has documented how the mere presence of schools in a community is associated with a variety of individual behaviors, few studies have tested how distinct features of schools are related to individuals' family formation. 2) To test specific mechanisms linking school characteristics to marriage timing. As individuals participate in the schooling system, other activities in their life courses in addition to marriage are also likely to change. Distinct school characteristics implicate individual mechanisms involving processes including role incompatibility, human capital attainment, non-family work experiences, non-family living, and media consumption. 3) To examine gender differences in the relationships between school characteristics and marriage timing. Prior work has shown that the educational experience can have different consequences for men and women's marriage timing, with some experiences accelerating marriage for one sex but delaying marriage for the other. There is good reason to expect that school characteristics may also be differentially related to the timing of men and women's marriages. The setting for this proposed project is the Chitwan Valley in Nepal. The project is able to take advantage of detailed documentation of a setting in which the spread of mass education has taken place within the lifetimes of current residents. Within a setting of rapid social change, this project examines how schools, as institutions, affect the transition to marriage. This transition is an important point in the life course and it sequences other events, including childbearing, employment, and intergenerational relationships.