Marital Dissolution and Child Educational Outcomes in San Borja, Bolivia

Abstract

Purpose: Serial monogamy is likely an adaptive mating strategy for women when the expected future fitness gains with a different partner are greater than expected future fitness with one's current partner. Methods: Using interview data from over 400 women in San Borja, Bolivia, discrete-time event history analyses and random effects regression analyses are conducted to examine predictors of marital dissolution, separated by remarriage status, and child educational outcomes. Results: Male income is inversely associated with women's risk of 'divorce and remarriage', while female income is positively associated with women's risk of 'divorce, but not remarriage'. Children of women who 'divorce and remarry' tend to have significantly lower educational outcomes than children of married parents, but women with higher incomes are able to buffer their children from the negative educational outcomes of divorce and remarriage. Counter to predictions, there is no evidence that women with kin in the community have a significant difference in likelihood of divorce or a buffering effect of child outcomes. Conclusions: In conclusion, there are different predictors of divorce depending on whether the woman goes on to remarry, suggesting that male income may be a better predictor of a serial monogamy strategy, while female income predicts marital dissolution only. These results suggest that women who are relatively autonomous because of greater income may not benefit from remarriage.

Pathways from education to fertility decline: a multi-site comparative study

“…Husband's education may have a smaller influence on fertility in San Borja because of higher divorce rates (approx. 33% of marriages end in divorce [76]), while divorce rates in Matlab and Poland are much lower [63]. By examining fertility outcomes for an individual woman, her current husband's education may not correspond to her lifetime fertility decisions if their relationship has not extended throughout her reproductive career, which may influence our San Borja results more than the other contexts.…”

23. Bateman’s Principles and the Study of Evolutionary Demography

“…Indeed, the varying significance of paternal investment may account for the association between high reproductive rates of extramarital sex and limited heritable wealth transmitted through the male line (Gaulin & Schlegel 1980). Again, systematic analyses, as larger comparative data sets become available, would pay off, especially if they pay attention to differentiating the factors precipitating marital dissolution and successful remarriage, how these might differ between the sexes (e.g., Snopkowski 2016), and what the specific mechanisms for differential fertility contingent on partner number might be (e.g., Lappegård & Rønsen 2013).…”

Behavioral Ecology of the Family: Harnessing Theory to Better Understand Variation in Human Families

“…Researchers are also interested in factors associated with divorce, as negative child outcomes have been associated with parental divorce in many post-industrial societies (Amato 2000). An historical and cross-cultural perspective provides evidence that divorce rates vary across time and space (Apostolou 2007;Heaton et al 2001) and a variety of factors may be associated with divorce rates, such as adult sex ratio (Schacht and Mulder 2015;Schacht and Kramer 2016), the availability of alloparents (Quinlan and Quinlan 2007), or women's financial autonomy (Snopkowski 2016). In this issue, Winking and Koster (2021) examine the causes of divorce among a Mayangna/Miskito community in Nicaragua to identify the costs and benefits of marriage and divorce, and determine whether divorce trends mirror those in post-industrial societies.…”