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Does Absence Matter?

A Comparison of Three Types of Father Absence in Rural Bangladesh

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Abstract

This paper examines the effects of three different types of father absence on the timing of life history events among women in rural Bangladesh. Age at marriage and age at first birth are compared across women who experienced different father presence/absence conditions as children. Survival analyses show that daughters of fathers who divorced their mothers or deserted their families have consistently younger ages at marriage and first birth than other women. In contrast, daughters whose fathers were labor migrants have consistently older ages at marriage and first birth. Daughters whose fathers died when they were children show older ages at marriage and first birth than women with divorced/deserted fathers and women with fathers present. These effects may be mediated by high socioeconomic status and high levels of parental investment among the children of labor migrants, and a combination of low investment, high psychosocial stress, and low alloparental investment among women with divorced/deserted fathers. Our findings are most consistent with the Child Development Theory model of female life history strategies, though the Paternal Investment and Psychosocial Acceleration models also help explain differences between women in low paternal investment situations (e.g., father divorced/abandoned vs. father dead). Father absence in and of itself seems to have little effect on the life history strategies of Bangladeshi women once key reasons for or correlates of absence are controlled, and none of the models is a good predictor of why women with deceased fathers have delayed life histories compared with women whose fathers are present.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge funding from National Science Foundation Award No. BCS-0924630 funded by the Cultural Anthropology and Methodology, Measurement and Statistics Programs. This research would not have been possible without our collaboration with the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), especially the Health and Demographic Surveillance Unit headed by Peter Kim Streatfield (Dhaka) and Taslim Ali (Matlab). Great thanks are due to our field assistants, Shifat Khan, Nargis Sultana, Latifun Nahar, Akterun Naher, Lutfa Begum, Mouloda Aziz, and Farhana Akand. We would also like to thank the people of Matlab, Bangladesh, for their unfailing curiosity and helpfulness during this project and ongoing research. Special thanks are due to Roslyn Fraser and Sabrina Mahtab for comments helpful for interpretation of results given while still in the field. Finally, we would like to thank Patricia Draper and three anonymous reviewers for their extensive and very helpful comments, a few of which have been incorporated verbatim.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, 107 Swallow Hall, Columbia, MO, 65211-1440, USA

    Mary K. Shenk & Kathrine Starkweather

  2. 4775 Tanners Spring Rd, Johns Creek, GA, 30022, USA

    Howard C. Kress

  3. Health and Demographic Surveillance Unit-Dhaka, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, GPO Box 128, Dhaka, 1000, Bangladesh

    Nurul Alam

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  1. Mary K. Shenk
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Shenk, M.K., Starkweather, K., Kress, H.C. et al. Does Absence Matter?. Hum Nat 24, 76–110 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-013-9160-5

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