Tina J Gregory and Dr. Renata Forste, Sociology
As economic and social changes continue to reshape familial relationships and processes in Latin America, there is much debate over whether these changes are increasing or decreasing the family’s quality of life. Some researchers argue that as individual roles within the family are redefined – especially in terms of traditional parental gender roles – family stability is disrupted. Others who are more reform-oriented assert that development, with its emphasis on providing more opportunities for women’s education and employment, is beneficial for families because it is beneficial for mothers. However, both theoretical camps agree that because of autonomy’s implications for familial well-being, there is an important need to understand what factors influence autonomy, and how changes in women’s autonomy affect familial processes.
Previous studies of female autonomy have produced inconclusive results about the factors and effects of autonomy, especially when looking at developing countries. Much of the research has concentrated on single-factor explanations, thus rendering them unable to fully address the complex interactions between influences on autonomy. My research goal was to create and employ a multi-factor theory to discuss the factors, manifestations, and outcomes of women’s decision-making autonomy. For the purposes of this study, I defined autonomy as having the ability and resources to make and enact significant decisions about one’s immediate personal or familial concerns. I hypothesized that women’s relative statuses (education, employment, age at marriage, socioeconomic status) have a greater effect on autonomy than do absolute statuses (age, income level, proximity to a large city), and that increases in relative status lead to greater autonomy in the home.
To evaluate my research questions, I used data from the Bolivia Family Interaction and Children’s Well-Being Survey (2000). My sample consisted of 865 mothers with at least one child under the age of 12. I cleaned the dataset, identified those variables that would prove salient in my analysis, created a model of autonomy, and used a statistical program to estimate the parameters of the model.
While I have made considerable progress on my research, I have not yet reached my final conclusions. Because of the complex nature of my structural equation model, time spent revising the model was longer than I had anticipated at the onset of the project. In addition to this frustration, I also decided that my results would be more substantial if I could add another dataset to my analysis. I am currently in the process of running analyses on a dataset from Nicaragua that is very similar to the Bolivia data I began working with.
Though I am still working on my project, the results of my study have been encouraging so far. First, by exploring the relationships between status factors and specific aspects of autonomy, my study reinforced the idea that autonomy must be studied as a multidimensional phenomenon. In every stage of analysis, multiple relative status factors proved statistically significant as indicators of women’s autonomy.
I also found that increases in relative status factors – such as increased age at marriage and socioeconomic status – increase women’s decision-making autonomy, and have positive effects on the family and children. This finding has important implications for social reformer programs in that it suggests that efforts to increase women’s autonomy must address more than just women’s education and employment.
Descriptive statistics indicated that the many wives enjoy a moderate level of autonomy. The majority of the women in the sample were involved to some degree in most household decisions. Also evident in the results was that greater decision-making autonomy is evidenced in higher latent reports of familial well-being.
Future work on this project will include analyzing the Nicaragua dataset using the same model that I used in studying the Bolivia dataset. I will then compare and contrast the results from the two analyses to see what trends occur in both groups. I hypothesize that these comparisons will yield similar results, and that any differences in the level of autonomy evidenced in these two nations will largely be due to differences in many absolute statuses. I hope that the comparative analysis of these datasets will give me representative conclusions about women’s autonomy that I can then generalize to Hispanic women. With a little more work on the data and my analyses, I anticipate having a polished paper to submit to a sociological conference and to academic journals by the end of the year 2002.