Chae Sophia
Guttmacher Institute, 125 Maiden Lane, New York, NY, 10038, USA.
Demography. 2016 Dec;53(6):1743-1770. doi: 10.1007/s13524-016-0521-7.
A growing body of literature has examined the impact of different types of family structures on children's schooling in sub-Saharan Africa. These studies have investigated how living arrangements, gender of the household head, parental death, and paternal migration are related to schooling. Although many sub-Saharan African countries have high divorce rates, very few studies have explored the impact of parental divorce on children's schooling. The present study uses three waves of data from the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) to investigate the effect of parental divorce on children's schooling and the possible mechanisms driving this relationship. Unlike prior studies, this study uses child-level fixed-effects models to control for selection into divorce. Results show that parental divorce is associated with lower grade attainment and a larger schooling gap, defined as the number of years a child is behind in school (among children currently attending school). Although no association exists between parental divorce and current school attendance, girls affected by divorce are significantly less likely to be attending school. Differences in economic resources, maternal coresidence, or maternal psychological well-being do not explain the relationship between parental divorce and children's schooling.
越来越多的文献研究了不同类型的家庭结构对撒哈拉以南非洲地区儿童教育的影响。这些研究调查了生活安排、户主性别、父母死亡以及父亲迁移与教育之间的关系。尽管许多撒哈拉以南非洲国家的离婚率很高,但很少有研究探讨父母离婚对儿童教育的影响。本研究使用来自马拉维家庭与健康纵向研究(MLSFH)的三轮数据,来调查父母离婚对儿童教育的影响以及驱动这种关系的可能机制。与先前的研究不同,本研究使用儿童层面的固定效应模型来控制离婚的选择因素。结果表明,父母离婚与较低的年级成就以及较大的教育差距相关,教育差距定义为孩子在学校落后的年数(在目前上学的孩子中)。尽管父母离婚与当前的入学率之间没有关联,但受离婚影响的女孩上学的可能性显著降低。经济资源、与母亲同住或母亲心理健康方面的差异并不能解释父母离婚与儿童教育之间的关系。