Margaret Frye

Qualitative evidence from sub-Saharan Africa, where a generalized AIDS epidemic exists, suggests that attractiveness may play a role in shaping individual-level HIV risk. Attractive women, who are often blamed for the epidemic and stigmatized, are believed

How can cultural understandings simultaneously diverge from and contribute to aggregate patterns of action? On one hand, shared cognitive associations guide people’s everyday actions, and these actions comprise the behavioral trends that sociologists seek to measure and understand. On the other hand, these shared understandings often contradict behavioral trends. I address this theoretical puzzle by considering the empirical case of sexual relationships and school dropout in Malawi. Moving recursively between longitudinal survey data and in-depth interviews, I compare statistical patterns and cultural beliefs about the relationship between sexual relationships and school dropout. Interviewees emphasized ways that relationships render girls incapable of continuing in school, whereas survey data provide limited support for these posited causal processes. However, these shared beliefs about the detrimental effects of relationships for school performance have real effects: teachers, parents, and students act as if these narratives were true, and these behavioral responses sustain the broader antinomy between sex and schooling. This analysis reveals new insights into how cultural understandings—and the various ways people respond to and enforce them—contribute to the demographic patterns we observe using survey data.

This paper examines the decline in non-numeric responses to questions about fertility preferences among women in the developing world. These types of response—such as ‘don’t know’ or ‘it’s up to God’—have often been interpreted through the lens of fertility transition theory as an indication that reproduction has not yet entered women’s ‘calculus of conscious choice’. However, this has yet to be investigated cross-nationally and over time. Using 19 years of data from 32 countries, we find that non-numeric fertility preferences decline most substantially in the early stages of a country’s fertility transition. Using country-specific and multilevel models, we explore the individual- and contextual-level characteristics associated with women’s likelihood of providing a non-numeric response to questions about their fertility preferences. Non-numeric fertility preferences are influenced by a host of social factors, with educational attainment and knowledge of contraception being the most robust and consistent predictors.

Chang, C. H., M. L. Barnes, M. Frye, M. Zhang, R.-C. Quan, L. M. G. Reisman, S. A. Levin, and D. S. Wilcove. 2017. The pleasure of pursuit: recreational hunters in rural Southwest China exhibit low exit rates in response to declining catch. Ecology and Society 22(1):43. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09072-220143