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Mass Education, International Travel, and Ideal Ages at Marriage

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Demography

Abstract

Opportunities to document associations between macro-level changes in social organization and the spread of new individual attitudes are relatively rare. Moreover, of the factors generally understood to be influential, little is known about the potential mechanisms that make them so powerful. Here we use longitudinal measures from the Chitwan Valley Family Study (CVFS) to describe the processes of ideational change across 12 years among a representative sample from a rural agrarian setting in South Asia. Findings from lagged dependent variable models show that (1) two key dimensions of social organization––education and international travel––are strongly associated with change in attitudes, net of prior attitudes; (2) reorganization of education and travel are associated with attitudes toward ideal age at marriage; and (3) this association varies by gender. Using the study’s prospective design, we document not only these important associations but also potential mechanisms of education and travel––exposure to the English language and friends’ international travel experience––as potentially powerful social influences on individuals’ attitudes, independent of their own experiences.

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Notes

  1. Although Nepal was never a British colony, its relationship with England is unique. Nepal has a long history of fighting for the British Army, starting from when Gorkha fighters managed to fend off the British Army’s attempts to expand their empire north of India. Since then, and up until recently, fighting for the British has been a prestigious profession that paid very well and opened the possibility of moving to England after retirement. This long-established connection to England––and the fact that it was very positive––has led to English influence spreading and being widely accepted in Nepal.

  2. Additional models restricted to respondents aged 26–78 (N = 2,260; mean age = 39.4 years) show that for older adults, the associations of education attained by 1996 and between 1996 and 2008 and friends’ travel experience with attitude change remain positive and significant, whereas the associations with educational context and international travel are no longer significant.

  3. It is possible that respondents move frequently in early life, which would suggest that this 1995 measure does not effectively capture their exposure to specific dimensions of education. We test this possibility with additional analyses using annual retrospective reports of residential status. We code a residential move as any change in respondents’ residence between years. We find that moving was quite rare: only 7% of the sample experienced any residential move during this period, much of which was associated with marriage, with a mean of .14 moves. Results from additional models show that any residential move prior to 1996 is not significantly associated with educational context (assessed in 1995), which is consistent with previous research on education and enrollment in this context (see Axinn and Barber 2001).

  4. No one in this sample travelled internationally prior to 1996.

  5. Respondents could theoretically be referring to either a distant or close relative/acquaintance. However, given what we know about social life in Chitwan, and Nepal more generally, and the Nepali language, “friends” likely refers to individuals residing closer to home and to those whom respondents have known for a long time.

  6. Individual-level fixed-effects models do not allow for estimation of the association between observed factors that are not time-varying, such as gender and educational attainment before 1996, and change in marriage age preferences. However, the study aims to document gender differences and how experiences and exposure to particular networks occurring before 1996, as well as between 1996 and 2008, relate to attitudes. As such, we present and discuss findings using the lagged dependent variable models discussed here and provide results from the fixed-effects models as a robustness check for these associations in the online appendix.

  7. Models indicating trivial or no strong change in the estimated associations between education/travel and attitude change include other sources of information (newspaper, radio, movie, television, video, and youth and other groups); additional assessments of SES (ever worked for pay and number of years worked for pay by 1996); household SES (own farmland, homeland, and/or livestock); housing quality (household type, number of stories, wall type, roof type, and floor type); parents’ and spouses’ SES (work for pay and own a home or outside business); parents’ education; and various conceptualizations of urban context (distance from the urban area, presence of electricity, and density of services (school, health center, bus stop, market, and employer; see Axinn and Yabiku 2001) within a five-minute walk in 1995).

  8. Existing work identified a cognitive component to education as influential for important outcomes (Baker et al. 2011) as well. Additional models testing for literacy include dichotomous measures indicating whether a respondent had ever read a newspaper (1) by 1996 and (2) by 2008 show that literacy is indeed strongly associated with both attitude outcomes. However, these associations are no longer significant once educational attainment are included in the models.

  9. Additional models among a sample restricted to respondents not enrolled in school in 1996 show that the main coefficient of education remains strong and positive, whereas educational context is no longer significant.

  10. We estimated additional models to further explore this association. Using information from 2008 life history calendars, we tested the associations of school type for each year in which a respondent was enrolled between 1996 and 2008. Results show that additional years of education attained during this period, regardless of school type, are associated with later marriage preferences. However, years enrolled in nongovernment schools (e.g., private or international organization) have a particularly strong association with ideational change.

  11. We estimated additional models including a dichotomous measure indicating more than one year (reference: one year) and a categorical variable with one group indicating international travel for one year and a second group indicating travel for more than one year (reference: no travel). The positive coefficients suggest that the more years of travel are associated with greater ideational change, although they are not statistically significant.

  12. Additional models show that travel to India is not significantly associated with change in either attitude outcome.

  13. Although individuals who marry later may have more opportunity to travel and/or meet others who have travelled, the vast majority of travel outside Nepal and India occurs after marriage: life history calendar data show that among the 96 respondents who travelled internationally between 1996 and 2008, 80% did so after marriage. Nevertheless, models account for marriage timing.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by an NICHD center grant to the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan (P2CHD041028). We would like to thank the Institute for Social and Environmental Research in Chitwan, Nepal for collecting the data used here; Jennifer Barber and Dirgha Ghimire for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript; and Cathy Sun for assisting with data management. The authors alone remain responsible for any errors or omissions.

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  1. NORC at the University of Chicago, 1155 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA

    Ellen L. Compernolle

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, 500 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    William G. Axinn

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  1. Ellen L. Compernolle
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Correspondence to Ellen L. Compernolle.

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Compernolle, E.L., Axinn, W.G. Mass Education, International Travel, and Ideal Ages at Marriage. Demography 56, 2083–2108 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-019-00838-7

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