Abstract
Post-marital residence norms govern where a married couple resides after marriage: with the husband’s family, the wife’s family, or independently. We study whether these arrangements affect female autonomy and domestic violence outcomes in four Southeast Asian countries—Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia, and Myanmar—where a sizable proportion of the population practices each type of marital residence. Compared to independently residing families within the same province-country, married women residing with the husband’s family have worse autonomy outcomes, whereas those residing with members of their own natal families fare substantially better. This aligns well with an anthropological understanding of how gendered patterns of influence in a social system might potentially interact with female empowerment. On the other hand, we observe that married women in both types of non-independent households suffer from less frequent domestic abuse compared to women residing independently, likely due to a deterrence effect from the presence of other family members.
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Data Availability
Our data comes from DHS surveys for Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, and the Philippines. Researchers can request access to this data at https://dhsprogram.com/data/available-datasets.cfm.
Notes
We elaborate on our data and the exact definitions of these terms in Sect. 2. We thank the Editor and an anonymous referee for stressing this distinction as well as suggesting this alternative terminology.
This is a non-trivial exercise since the data does not contain pre-existing measures of post-marital residence type. We discuss this in much more detail in the Data section.
The extant literature refers to domestic violence suffered by women at the hands of their husbands or partners as intimate-partner violence or IPV.
We do not observe domestic violence data for Indonesia.
Such “mixed” households are few in number, ranging from 5.2% in the Philippines to 11.2% in Cambodia, and are excluded from much of our analysis.
We use the Stata command bimap written by Asjad Naqvi. The heatmaps are based on the most recent DHS wave for each country.
Our results are robust to flexibly controlling for each education level as well as interactions of education levels with age dummies and birth cohort dummies. We discuss these results in Sect. 4.
We follow the common practice of controlling for son preference since it might be related to other indicators of gender attitudes, though son preference is more well-documented as a proxy for conservativeness in the context of South Asia than Southeast Asia (Yeung et al. 2018).
For women in matrilocated setups who co-reside with their parents, this would mean visiting other relatives or members of their extended family.
We thank the Editor for suggesting this helpful check.
We use responses to the underlying questions for these variables to create binary variables and normalize them using the mean and standard deviation of the independent households. We then sum these normalized variables and re-normalize them to obtain these indices.
One might be worried that women in non-independent households may be under-reporting IPV due to privacy concerns. DHS takes several precautions to ensure privacy while administering this module, as discussed above, minimizing the potential of such biases driving our results.
In Supplementary Material Figure A.1, we conduct the above exercise for domestic violence outcomes. However, the results are much less precisely estimated due to a substantially smaller sample size, even in the pooled sample, due to the lack of these outcomes for Indonesia. Nevertheless, the point estimates for both matri and patri are either at or below zero, except for the 25+ marriage tenure category for the former, possibly due to a much smaller number of observations in this last bin.
Note that the household type for this analysis could be defined based on the relationships of other household members to the head. For instance, the wife of the head in a matrilocated household presumably co-resides with her married daughter, while the wife of the head in a patrilocated setup is likely to have co-resident daughters-in-law.
In Supplementary Material Figure A.2, we conduct this check on the disaggregated measures of attitudes towards wife-beating and largely find the same patterns: any differences that manifest in the uncontrolled specifications disappear once our set of controls is added.
We additionally have data from Cambodia on whether respondents believe that beating their sons or daughters is justified, and the results using these variables as proxies of conservativeness are similar.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Daniela Hofmann, Penny Bickle, editor Terra McKinnish, three anonymous reviewers, and seminar participants at the University of Rochester and at the Canadian Economic Association 2023 Annual Meeting for helpful feedback. We do not have any conflict of interest.
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Khalil, U., Mookerjee, S. & Ray, A. Post-marital residence and female wellbeing. J Popul Econ 37, 49 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-024-01025-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-024-01025-8