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Parental Divorce and Children’s Schooling in Rural Malawi

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Demography

Abstract

A growing body of literature has examined the impact of different types of family structures on children’s schooling in sub-Saharan Africa. These studies have investigated how living arrangements, gender of the household head, parental death, and paternal migration are related to schooling. Although many sub-Saharan African countries have high divorce rates, very few studies have explored the impact of parental divorce on children’s schooling. The present study uses three waves of data from the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) to investigate the effect of parental divorce on children’s schooling and the possible mechanisms driving this relationship. Unlike prior studies, this study uses child-level fixed-effects models to control for selection into divorce. Results show that parental divorce is associated with lower grade attainment and a larger schooling gap, defined as the number of years a child is behind in school (among children currently attending school). Although no association exists between parental divorce and current school attendance, girls affected by divorce are significantly less likely to be attending school. Differences in economic resources, maternal coresidence, or maternal psychological well-being do not explain the relationship between parental divorce and children’s schooling.

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Notes

  1. Although school fees have the potential to affect decisions regarding secondary school enrollment, this is not an issue in this study because most secondary school-aged children have not yet completed primary school. In the analytic sample, only 13 % of 15-year-old-children have completed eight or more grades of schooling and are eligible to attend secondary school.

  2. In 2006, the survey consisted of three questionnaires (family listing, main survey, and biomarker) that were fielded by three survey teams. In 2008, the family listing and main survey questionnaires were combined into a single questionnaire, and the biomarker questionnaire was fielded separately. In 2010, only the family listing/main survey questionnaire was fielded.

  3. In Malawi, it is not uncommon for individuals to change names or report different names across survey waves (adams et al. 2013). Women may change their name upon marriage, taking their husband’s first or last name, or parents may change their child’s name to that of a relative who passed away. Furthermore, some people may have multiple nicknames used in different contexts or different names in different languages. Because of the fluidity of naming patterns, respondents may not consistently report the same names across survey waves.

  4. Because of the small number of separations reported by women, I combined separations and divorces into the same category.

  5. An initial tabulation of grade attainment by age indicated that some children had been reported to have higher grade attainment than is appropriate for their age. I dropped 95 children who were reported to have three or more grades of schooling more than is appropriate for their age.

  6. During the 2006–2008 period, 67 children were dropped; during the 2008–2010 period, 79 children were dropped.

  7. Although a household wealth index is available in the data set, more women have missing data on this variable than on the household amenity variables. To prevent further reduction of the analytic sample, I decided to control for household amenities. In addition, growing evidence suggests that household wealth indices created using principal component analysis often misclassify subjects into the wrong wealth quintile (Howe et al. 2008; Sharker et al. 2014). The potential for misclassification served as another reason to control for selected household amenities instead of a household wealth index.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Hans-Peter Kohler, Jere Behrman, Susan Watkins, Jennifer Glick, Sarah Hayford, and Monica Grant for their helpful comments. The research was completed while the author was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01 HD053781, T32 HD007242).

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  1. Guttmacher Institute, 125 Maiden Lane, New York, NY, 10038, USA

    Sophia Chae

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Table 5 Random-effects regression coefficients of schooling outcomes, children aged 6–17: MLSFH, 2006–2010
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Chae, S. Parental Divorce and Children’s Schooling in Rural Malawi. Demography 53, 1743–1770 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-016-0521-7

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