One key hypothesis that has received considerable attention in recent family discourse is the notion that improvements in women’s socioeconomic circumstances (also called female autonomy) has a positive effect on familial processes and outcomes such as marital instability. Absent from this debate are cross-cultural research that test the applicability of these findings with non-U.S. data. We use representative data from Ghana to explore whether dimensions of women’s autonomy have the hypothesized positive effect on divorce processes in Africa. Consistent with findings from the United States, results from our African data demonstrate that women’s autonomy has a positive effect on divorce. This observation is true not only with the use of conventional autonomy measures such as work and education, but also with regard to institutional measures of autonomy such as matrilineal kinship ties. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006Africa, divorce, Ghana, marital instability, women’s autonomy,

Documenting the extent of psychiatric disorder among elders in developing societies sensitizes health planners to the growing reality of aging in their societies and the need for expanded physical and psychiatric health care services.

The first step in obtaining high quality information on the distribution of mental illness in developing countries is to establish some reliable and valid indicators of disorder. The checklist format for assessing disorder appears to meet this objective and offers the possibility that community-level prevalence studies can be reasonably conducted.

We investigated the extent to which methodological concerns explicitly addressed by the designers of the World Mental Health Surveys persist in the results that were obtained using the WMH-CIDI instrument. We compared rates of endorsement of mental illness symptoms in the United States (very high) and Nepal (very low) as they were affected by respondent understanding of the survey, social desirability bias, interview social context and translation-related sources of misunderstanding. The results showed that, although levels of misunderstanding and social desirability were higher in Nepal than in the U.S., these potential methodological concerns had less effect on symptom endorsement in Nepal than in the U.S. In Nepal non-methodological factors related to the socio-cultural context probably had a more substantial impact on observed symptom rates than did the methodological factors. The larger issue is the effect that methodological factors have on the validity of reported rates of disorder. Keywords Measurement . Psychiatric disorder . ReliabilitySince the publication of the Global Burden of Disease study (Murray and Lopez 1996) and its conclusion that mental disorders are both prevalent and disabling, there has been a sustained interest in understanding the true extent of this problem. The estimates provided in that study were based on research findings that used different techniques for assessing disorder, different types of and sized samples and different spectrums of disorder. To rectify these problems investigators have attempted to employ more careful means for assessing disorders and for obtaining information from better samples of populations. Easily the most ambitious of these attempts is the World Mental Health Surveys (WMH) project that has employed a carefully constructed version of the Composite International Diagnostic

Psychological disorders are a substantial part of the disease burden in many developing countries, yet few health services are directed toward the detection and treatment of these disorders. The relationship between psychological disorders and physical health problems was investigated by means of a community survey (N =653) in a small village in Nepal, using a shortened version of the DSM-III-R Checklist to estimate the prevalence of several psychological disorders and a version of the Cornell Medical Index to assess physical illness symptoms. Results indicate that approximately 18.4 percent of this rural population has had a diagnosable mental illness. Moreover, there is substantial overlap between physical health problems and psychological disorder for those with a psychological disorder (32.5%). The findings indicate that health providers in developing countries need to screen for psychological disorders as a standard part of health assessments.