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Although intimate partner violence (IPV) is inherently a relational event shaped by couple-level factors, most empirical examinations of IPV-related attitudes have used individuals as the unit of analysis. We apply a dyadic perspective to the study of attitudes about the acceptability of IPV, harnessing couple-level data from 33 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a region characterized by particularly high levels of both the incidence and acceptance of IPV. We document considerable geographic heterogeneity in the distribution of attitudinal concordance or discordance regarding the acceptability of IPV within couples, a descriptive finding that is overlooked by studies focused on individuals as the unit of analysis. In addition, applying a dyadic perspective to the correlates of attitudinal concordance, we demonstrate that joint exposure to schooling, work, and media is more predictive of joint rejection of IPV than are singular exposures of wives or husbands. Finally, we show that distinct combinations of attitudes within couples are associated with differential likelihoods of wives reporting having recently experienced emotional, physical, or sexual IPV. In particular, when both partners reject IPV, wives are significantly less likely to report experiencing each type of IPV in the past year compared with any other combination of attitudes. Our results reveal that a dyadic perspective provides a comprehensive understanding of intracouple contexts that enhances our perspective on these important demographic outcomes.

OBJECTIVE: This paper documents how intra-marital differences in educational status vary across Africa’s heterogeneous educational expansion, which has encompassed an enormous breadth of educational opportunities over the past 50 years. BACKGROUND: Educational expansion influences intra-marital status differences both by altering the educational composition of men and women and by reconfiguring the social conventions associated with a given educational context. Status differentials between marital partners can influence spousal wellbeing and, in the aggregate, determine the extent to which marriage provides a pathway to upward social mobility. METHOD: Using Demographic and Health Survey data representing 32 sub-Saharan African countries and 5 decades of birth cohorts, the paper examines the prevalence and propensity of educational pairings as a function of educational access (the percentage of a cohort who ever attended school) and wife’s education level. RESULTS: Educational expansion created gendered changes in educational compositions of married individuals, which led to increased prevalence of hypergamy (wives who married “up”) in most countries. Educational expansion has also led hypogamous marriages to become less of a social aberration: in lower-education contexts (but less so in higher-education contexts), conventions lead women to “marry down” at far lower rates than would be expected based on the sex-specific compositions of husbands and wives. CONCLUSION: Educational attainment remains a central determinant of social positioning in African society. However, as schooling expands across the continent, social conventions regarding educational status are playing a weakening role in determining who marries whom.

Sociologists have shown that moral understandings of market exchanges can differ between historical periods and institutional settings, but have paid less attention to how producers’ moral frameworks vary depending on their unequal positions within both markets and institutions. We use interviews and ethnographic observations to examine the vibrant market of research shops selling academic work to students around two of Uganda’s top universities. We identify three groups of researchers— Knowledge Producers, Entrepreneurs, and Educators—who construct different professional identities and moral justifications of their trade, and orient their market action accordingly. We demonstrate that these identities and moral frameworks reflect an interplay between the institutional contexts and the social class positions that researchers occupy within this illicit market. While Knowledge Producers and Entrepreneurs both experienced a sense of “fit” with their respective institutional cultures, the former now see their work as compromising ideals of research, whereas the latter capitalize on what they view as a broken system. Educators, disadvantaged at both institutions, articulate a framework countering the dominant institutional cultures and sympathetic to underperforming students. This approach illuminates how institutional contexts and individual class positions within them influence producers’ moral frameworks, leading to differentiation of the market.This article is forthcoming at the American Sociological Review.

INTRODUCTION Improving the timeliness and completion of vaccination is the key to reducing under-5 childhood mortality. This study examines the prevalence of delayed vaccination for doses administered at birth and age 6 weeks, 10 weeks, 14 weeks, and 9 months and its association with undervaccination among infants in Sub-Saharan Africa. METHODS Pooling data across 33 Sub-Saharan Africa countries, vaccination timing and series completion were assessed for children aged 12-35 months who were included in the immunization module of the Demographic and Health Surveys conducted between 2010 and 2019. Survey design-adjusted logistic regression modeled the likelihood of not fully completing the basic immunization schedule associated with dose-specific delays in vaccination. Data were obtained and analyzed in May 2020. RESULTS Among children with complete date records (n=70,006), the proportion of children vaccinated with delays by ≥1 month was high: 25.9% for Bacille Calmette-Guerin (at birth); 49.1% for the third dose of pentavalent combination vaccine (at 14 weeks); and 63.9% for the first dose of measles vaccines (at 9 months). Late vaccination was more common for children born to mothers with lower levels of educational attainment (p

In Uganda, the cultural norm of hypergamy, which dictates that husbands should have higher economic and social status than wives, is pervasive and influential. Yet hypergamy has recently been challenged by women’s gains in education relative to men and by an unemployment crisis leaving educated young men unable to find steady work. Using interviews with recent university graduates in Kampala, we investigate how highly educated young adults navigate frictions between the hypergamy ideal and these recent transformations in gendered status. Some women reduce the salience of hypergamy by preventing their relationships from becoming serious, while other women intentionally perform the role of submissive housewife while preserving their autonomy. Men reframe their romantic circumstances to underplay their inability to achieve economic hypergamy, portraying educated women as undesirable and characterizing their partners as nonmaterialistic. These findings reveal how demographic and economic changes reconfigure relationship norms, gendered power dynamics, and family formation processes.

This chapter argues that an important item on the agenda for the ongoing dialogue between cognitive scientists and microsociologists is how to replace Cartesian mind-body dualism. Although it takes the position that strict mind-body dualism should be laid to rest, it argues that replacing this dichotomy with a holistic theory risks making it harder for researchers to see analytic distinctions that make a real difference. It uses examples from Loïc Wacquant’s Body and Soul to illustrate the argument that sociologists should replace the old dualism with a new, improved one that incorporates cognitive science regarding differences between habitual, embodied cognition and intentional, discursive cognition. This will help microsociologists and cognitive scientists be in the best possible position to understand, enrich, and improve each other’s work.

Background: 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 to pose a higher HIV risk because they are viewed as having more and riskier partners. Objective: We examine the association between perceived attractiveness and HIV infection and risk in rural Malawi in the midst of the country's severe AIDS epidemic. Methods: We use interviewers' ratings of respondents' attractiveness, along with HIV test results and women's assessments of their own likelihood of infection, to estimate the association between perceived attractiveness and HIV infection and risk for a random sample of 961 women aged 15‒35. Results: Results show that women who are rated by interviewers as 'much less' or 'less' attractive than other women their age are 9Š more likely to test positive for HIV. We also find that attractiveness is associated with women's own assessments of their HIV risk: Among women who tested negative, those perceived as 'much less' or 'less' attractive than average report themselves to be at greater risk of HIV infection. Conclusions: These results suggest that attractiveness is negatively associated with HIV risk in Malawi, countering local beliefs that hold attractive women responsible for perpetuating the epidemic. Contribution: This study highlights the need to consider perceived physical attractiveness, and sexual desirability more broadly, as an under-examined axis of inequality in HIV risk in high-prevalence settings.

In this article we compare how AIDS in Malawi is represented in two sources of data, newspaper articles and conversational field journals that depict local interpretations of the epidemic, over the ten-year period 1999–2008. In each of these discursive fields we focus on “moral vocabularies”—the sets of instructions about what people should and should not do to reduce their personal risks or to mitigate the burdens of HIV infection. During this decade, international AIDS organizations came to define the epidemic in the global South as a crisis to be managed less by individual effort than by interactions with bureaucratic institutions. In Malawi, these include Government of Malawi health facilities that provide testing, treatment, and other forms of medical care, as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and associations that support people living with HIV or AIDS (PLWHA) and orphans. In 1995 there were 12 NGOs registered as implementing AIDS activities; by 2005, there were approximately 300, most of them small but formalized community-based organizations in rural areas (Wangel 1995; National AIDS Commission 2005; Swidler and Watkins 2009). Correspondingly, we found a shift in the moral vocabularies deployed in response to AIDS, from injunctions about individual behavioral choices toward those that require engagement with formal institutions. By comparing the moral vocabularies in media accounts and informal conversations, we uncover striking differences. While the frequency of injunctions to engage with specialized institutions increased in both sources

Imagined futures, once a vital topic of theoretical inquiry within the sociology of culture, have been sidelined in recent decades. Rational choice models cannot explain the seemingly irrational optimism of youth aspirations, pointing to the need to explore other alternatives. This article incorporates insights from pragmatist theory and cognitive sociology to examine the relationship between imagined futures and present actions and experiences in rural Malawi, where future optimism appears particularly unfounded. Drawing from in-depth interviews and archival sources documenting ideological campaigns promoting schooling, the author shows that four elements are understood to jointly produce educational success: ambitious career goals, sustained effort, unflagging optimism, and resistance to temptation. Aspirations should be interpreted not as rational calculations, but instead as assertions of a virtuous identity, claims to be “one who aspires.”

This figure depicts the gendered patterns of educational expansion across Africa. The horizontal axis displays educational access, and vertical lines represent educational gender gaps for 267 country-specific birth cohorts, representing adults born between 1941 and 1992 in 32 African countries. The gaps take on an almond shape. In early stages of educational expansion, boys enter school at higher rates than girls; female enrollment begins to catch up only when at least half of the cohort attends school. Cohorts with the lowest educational access are disproportionately located in West Africa, and most higher-access cohorts are in central and southern Africa. In more than 30 percent of cohorts from central and southern African countries, girls surpass boys in rates of basic educational participation. Africa’s gender inequality is structured not only by regional context and temporal trends but also by a country’s position along the spectrum from scarcity to abundance of educational opportunities.

Research on young-adult sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa typically conceptualizes sex as an individual-level risk behavior. We introduce a new approach that connects the conditions surrounding the initiation of sex with subsequent relationship well-being, examines relationships as sequences of interdependent events, and indexes relationship experiences to individually held ideals. New card-sort data from southern Malawi capture young women’s relationship experiences and their ideals in a sequential framework. Using optimal matching, we measure the distance between ideal and experienced relationship sequences to (1) assess the associations between ideological congruence and perceived relationship well-being, (2) compare this ideal-based approach to other experience-based alternatives, and (3) identify individual- and couple-level correlates of congruence between ideals and experiences in the romantic realm. We show that congruence between ideals and experiences conveys relationship well-being along four dimensions: expressions of love and support, robust communication habits, perceived biological safety, and perceived relationship stability. We further show that congruence is patterned by socioeconomic status and supported by shared ideals within romantic dyads. We argue that conceiving of ideals as anchors for how sexual experiences are manifest advances current understandings of romantic relationships, and we suggest that this approach has applications for other domains of life.

A paradox exists in modern schooling: students are simultaneously more positive about the future and more depressed than ever. We suggest that these two phenomena may be linked. Two studies demonstrated that students are more likely to be depressed when educational aspirations exceed expectations. In Study 1 (N = 85) aspiring to a thesis grade higher than one expected predicted greater depression at the beginning and end of the academic year. In Study 2 (N = 2820) aspiring to a level of education (e.g., attending college) higher than one expected to achieve predicted greater depression cross-sectionally and five years later. In both cases the negative effects of aspiring high while expecting low persisted even after controlling for whether or not students achieved their educational aspirations. These findings highlight the danger of teaching students to aspire higher without also investing time and money to ensure that students can reasonably expect to achieve their educational goals.

The recent flood of research concerning pollutants in personal environmental and biological samples—blood, urine, breastmilk, household dust and air, umbilical cord blood, and other media—raises questions about whether and how to report results to individual study participants. Clinical medicine provides an expert-driven framework, whereas community-based participatory research emphasizes participants’ right to know and the potential to inform action even when health effects are uncertain. Activist efforts offer other models. We consider ethical issues involved in the decision to report individual results in exposure studies and what information should be included. Our discussion is informed by our experience with 120 women in a study of 89 pollutants in homes and by interviews with other researchers and institutional review board staff.

Three studies explored the relative importance of various manipulations of the social environment on appreciation of humor in college males. The experimental situations included hostility-arousal, individual versus group administration, and a laughing versus non-laughing confederate (CE). Overt laughter was more responsive to manipulation than was rating of jokes; however, both responses were clearly influenced. Group administration and laughter by the CE resulted in social facilitation of responsiveness to humor, while hostility-arousal and CE's embarrassment at sex jokes markedly decreased Ss' assessed behavior.