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Developmental Idealism and Cultural Models of the Family in Malawi

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Abstract

This paper examines the extent to which developmental idealism has been disseminated in Malawi. Developmental idealism is a set of beliefs and values about development and the relationships between development and family structures and behavior. Developmental idealism states that attributes of societies and families defined as modern are better than attributes defined as traditional, that modern societies help produce modern families, that modern families facilitate the achievement of modern societies, and that the future will bring family change in the direction of modernity. Previous research has demonstrated that knowledge of developmental idealism is widespread in many places around the world, but provides little systematic data about it in sub-Saharan Africa or how knowledge of it is associated with certain demographic characteristics in that region. In this paper, we address this issue by examining whether ordinary people in two settings in Malawi, a sub-Saharan African country, have received and understood messages that are intended to associate development with certain types of family forms and family behaviors. We then examine associations between demographic characteristics and developmental idealism to investigate possible mechanisms linking global discourse about development to the grassroots. We analyze data collected in face-to-face surveys from two samples of Malawian men in 2009 and 2010, one rural, the other in a low-to-medium income neighborhood of a city. Our analysis of these survey data shows considerable evidence that many developmental idealism beliefs have been spread in that country and that education has positive effects on beliefs in the association between development and family attributes. We also find higher levels of developmental idealism awareness in the urban sample than we do in the rural sample, but once dissimilarities in education and wealth between the two samples are controlled, awareness levels no longer differed between urban and rural respondents. We explore how these beliefs intersect with longstanding local values and beliefs in Malawi.

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Notes

  1. Because the wealth quartile cutoff points are determined based on the distribution of expenditures across both samples, there is an uneven distribution of respondents across wealth quartiles within the urban and rural samples. Specifically, the rural respondents are grouped mostly in the two poorest quartiles (and there are no rural respondents in the richest quartile) and the urban respondents are grouped mostly in the top two quartiles. While this is not ideal for examining the associations between wealth and DI Beliefs within each of the samples, it is the only way to code wealth so that we can do a comparable analysis of the relationship of wealth with DI Beliefs in both the urban and rural samples.

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Acknowledgments

We are particularly grateful to Rebecca Thornton and Susan Godlonton for including our developmental idealism questions in their surveys, making the data available to us, and providing guidance on its use. We also appreciate the research support provided by the University of Michigan Population Studies Center, from an NICHD analysis grant, (R37-HD039425), and from an NICHD center grant to the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan (R24 HD041028). One of the authors was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship [Grant No. DGE 0718128]. Judy Baughn and Tina Wells contributed to this paper by their excellent work in the preparation of the manuscript.

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  1. Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Arland Thornton, Rachael S. Pierotti & Linda Young-DeMarco

  2. California Population Center, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Susan Watkins

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  1. Arland Thornton
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  2. Rachael S. Pierotti
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Correspondence to Arland Thornton.

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Thornton, A., Pierotti, R.S., Young-DeMarco, L. et al. Developmental Idealism and Cultural Models of the Family in Malawi. Popul Res Policy Rev 33, 693–716 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-014-9322-0

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