We examine the association of community linguistic diversity with non-spousal sexual activity in Uganda. We conducted a survey on rates of sexual contact in last 12 months among 1709 respondents age 18–60 living in Uganda in early 2001. Households were selected at random from Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2000 household sampling frame listings in 12 districts and 120 clusters. Household listings described the principal language spoken by every household in the cluster. Sexual contact was reported by 26 vs. 13% of unmarried women in multilingual vs. monolingual clusters respectively. Extramarital sexual contact occurred for 29 vs. 16% for married men in multilingual vs. monolingual clusters respectively. These results were robust to multivariate models which included confounders such as urbanity, and cluster distance to market places, cinemas, and transportation. Our results suggest a robust association between residence in a multilinguistic community and higher rates of non-spousal sex.
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Notes
This strategy is not perfect because in Uganda there are groups that claim differing ethnicity, but share common language. If anything, this limitation makes it less likely that we will confirm our hypothesis, because there could be ethnic variation that is not captured by a measure of language variation.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors wish to thank the Johns Hopkins Center for AIDS Research for supporting this research (5P30AI042855-04). Helpful comments from seminar participants at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Brown University Population Studies and Training Center, and from Michael McQuestion and Saifuddin Ahmed are gratefully acknowledged. Finally, we thank Martha Ainsworth, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and the European Union, for their contributions to data collection.
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Bishai, D., Patil, P., Pariyo, G. et al. The Babel Effect: Community Linguistic Diversity and Extramarital Sex in Uganda. AIDS Behav 10, 369–376 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-006-9097-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-006-9097-3