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The Behavioral Ecology of Family Planning

Two Ethnic Groups in Northeast India

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An Erratum to this article was published on 06 October 2007

Abstract

Family planning is the usual modern route to producing a small family. Can human behavioral ecology provide a framework for understanding family planning behavior? Hillard S. Kaplan (Yearb. Phys. Anthropol. 39:91–135) has proposed a general theory of human parental investment based on the importance of skills development in children. As modern, skills-based, competitive market economies are established, parental investment strategies would be predicted to become oriented toward producing increasingly competitive offspring in a pattern of coordinated investment in their embodied capital—in other words, skills training along with good health to ensure their long-term productivity. Parental embodied capital and resources are also expected to be associated with motivation to produce competitive offspring. The basic parental investment trade-off between quality and quantity should predict greater investment in fewer children and the adoption of family planning behavior. Data on family planning in two ethnic groups in Northeast India (Khasi and Bengali) currently experiencing early-phase transition into modern market economies from very different social and ecological baselines are examined within this analytical framework. The results show a mixture of strategies in conjunction with family planning that involve decreased as well as increased investment in the embodied capital of children among Bengali and a divergence of investments in education and health among Khasi. These mixtures of strategies provide some insight into the motivations to use family planning in the face of economic transition, given differing local cultural and ecological conditions and the opportunity structures they provide.

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Notes

  1. Children’s weights are converted to weight for age/sex z-scores based on National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) standards using their public domain program EpiInfo6. The scores provide a measure for each child that is relative to the particular NCHS reference value for children of the same age and sex. A negative measure indicates the child is below the standard, and a positive one, above the standard. This conversion allows direct comparison of children of all ages and both sexes (World Health Organization 1995). Thus, the z-scores can be averaged over the sibship to obtain one measure of the health of the sibship.

  2. No statistical comparison of land area cultivated is given since the quality and value of land differs so much between the hilly areas where the Khasi live and the plains where the Bengali live. The areas (Khasi, 2.0 ± 3.6; Bengali, 3.0 ± 4.6 ha [mean ± SD]), however, are used in the regression analysis as their relative size is important within each group.

  3. Work effort contributions by the woman and her husband were estimated based on a questionnaire regarding which of 17 crop production and processing activities were performed and how often. The lists of activities were compiled based on descriptions by local people familiar with the routines of crop production and processing. Based on an epidemiological approach to physical activity (Paffenbarger et al. 1978), each activity was assigned a kilocalorie expenditure value and a measure (kcal units/year) was then estimated (see Leonetti et al. 2005).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195-3100, USA

    Donna L. Leonetti

  2. Gauhati University, Guwahati, India

    Dilip C. Nath

  3. Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, India

    Natabar S. Hemam

Authors
  1. Donna L. Leonetti
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  2. Dilip C. Nath
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  3. Natabar S. Hemam
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Correspondence to Donna L. Leonetti.

Additional information

An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12110-007-9025-x

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Leonetti, D.L., Nath, D.C. & Hemam, N.S. The Behavioral Ecology of Family Planning. Hum Nat 18, 225–241 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-007-9010-4

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