Drivers of prohibited natural resource collection in Chitwan National Park, Nepal.

Protected areas (PAs) are critical for achieving conservation, economic and development goals, but the factors that lead households to engage in prohibited resource collection in PAs are not well understood. We examine collection behaviours in community forests and the protected Chitwan National Park in Chitwan, Nepal. Our approach incorporates household and ecological data, including structured interviews, spatially explicit data on collection behaviours measured with computer tablets and a systematic field survey of invasive species. We pair our data with a framework that considers factors related to a household's demand for resources, barriers to prohibited resource collection, barriers to legal resource collection and alternatives to resource collection. The analysis identifies key drivers of prohibited collection, including sociodemographic variables and perceptions of an invasive plant (Mikania micrantha). The social-ecological systems approach reveals that household perceptions of the presence of M. micrantha were more strongly associated with resource collection decisions than the actual ecologically measured presence of the plant. We explore the policy implications of our findings for PAs and propose that employing a social-ecological systems approach leads to conservation policy and scientific insights that are not possible to achieve with social or ecological approaches alone.

Parents' Marital Quality and Children's Transition to Adulthood.

Unique longitudinal measures from Nepal allow us to link both mothers' and fathers' reports of their marital relationships with a subsequent long-term record of their children's behaviors. We focus on children's educational attainment and marriage timing because these two dimensions of the transition to adulthood have wide-ranging, long-lasting consequences. We find that children whose parents report strong marital affection and less spousal conflict attain higher levels of education and marry later than children whose parents do not. Furthermore, these findings are independent of each other and of multiple factors known to influence children's educational attainment and marriage timing. These intriguing results support theories pointing toward the long-term intergenerational consequences of variations in multiple dimensions of parents' marriages.

Emotional Variation and Fertility Behavior.

Emotional influences on fertility behaviors are an understudied topic that may offer a clear explanation of why many couples choose to have children even when childbearing is not economically rational. With setting-specific measures of the husband-wife emotional bond appropriate for large-scale population research matched with data from a long-term panel study, we have the empirical tools to provide a test of the influence of emotional factors on contraceptive use to limit fertility. This article presents those tests. We use long-term, multilevel community and family panel data to demonstrate that the variance in levels of husband-wife emotional bond is significantly associated with their subsequent use of contraception to avert births. We discuss the wide-ranging implications of this intriguing new result.

Ethnicity and Psychiatric Disorders.

Psychiatric disorders are one of the leading causes of disease-related disability in the world today. However, little is known about the ethnic variation of these disorders within populations. This is especially true in contexts outside of the United States and the European Diaspora. This study provides new evidence from South Asia on ethnic differences in Major Depressive Episode, Major Depressive Disorder, Panic Attack, Panic Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Intermittent Explosive Disorder. We use data from 400 adult interviews conducted in Nepal in a controlled comparison design as a case study. We use a series of multilevel logistic regression models to predict ethnic group differences in psychiatric disorders and episodes with measures from clinically validated World Mental Health survey instruments. Compared to the Brahmin/Chhetri group, we found historically excluded Dalits had statistically significantly higher odds of almost all psychiatric disorders and episodes. We also found that historically resilient Janajatis had statistically significantly lower odds of being diagnosed with PTSD than the majority Brahmin/Chhetri group. We also found no significant gender difference in MDD or MDE. Psychiatric disorders and episodes vary significantly by ethnicity within a rural Asian population, but gender differences are small.

Associations between the social organization of communities and psychiatric disorders in rural Asia.

PURPOSE: We provide rare evidence of factors producing psychiatric variation in a general population sample from rural South Asia. The setting is particularly useful for demonstrating that variations in the social organization of communities, often difficult to observe in rich countries, are associated with important variations in mental health. METHODS: Clinically validated survey measures are used to document variation in psychiatric disorders among 401 adults. This sample is chosen from a systematic sample of the general population of rural Nepal, in a community-level-controlled comparison design. Multilevel logistic regression is used to estimate multivariate models of the association between community-level nonfamily social organization and individual-level psychiatric disorders. RESULTS: Schools, markets, health services and social support groups each substantially reduce the odds of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), intermittent explosive disorder and anxiety disorders. Associations between schools, health services and social support groups and depression are statistically significant and independent of each other. The association between access to markets and PTSD is statistically significant and independent of other social organization and support groups. CONCLUSIONS: Community integration of some nonfamily social organizations promotes mental health in ways that may go unobserved in settings with many such organizations. More research on the mechanisms producing these associations is likely to reveal potential avenues for public policy and programs to improve mental health in the general population.

Marital processes, arranged marriage, and contraception to limit fertility.

An international transition away from familially arranged marriages toward participation in spouse choice has endured for decades and continues to spread through rural Asia today. Although we know that this transformation has important consequences for childbearing early in marriage, we know much less about longer-term consequences of this marital revolution. Drawing on theories of family and fertility change and a rural Asian panel study designed to measure changes in both marital and childbearing behaviors, this study seeks to investigate these long-term consequences. Controlling for social changes that shape both marital practices and childbearing behaviors, and explicitly considering multiple dimensions of marital processes, we find evidence consistent with an independent, long-standing association of participation in spouse choice with higher rates of contraception to terminate childbearing. These results add a new dimension to the evidence linking revolutions in marital behavior to long-term declines in fertility and suggest that new research should consider a broader range of long-term consequences of changing marital processes.

The measurement and prevalence of an ideational model of family and economic development in Nepal.

Developmental idealism (DI) is a system of beliefs and values that endorses modern societies and families and sees them as occurring together, with modern families as causes and consequences of societal development. This study was motivated by the belief that the population of Nepal has absorbed these ideas and that the ideas affect their family behaviour. We use data collected in Nepal in 2003 to show that Nepalis discuss ideas about development and its relationship to family life and that DI has been widely accepted. It is related in predictable ways to education, paid employment, rural-urban residence, and mass media exposure. Although it would be useful to know its influence on demographic decision-making and behaviour, we cannot evaluate this with our one-time cross-sectional survey. Our data and theory suggest that this influence may be substantial.

Household energy consumption: Community context and the fuelwood transition.

We examine the influence of community context on change over time in households' use of non-wood fuels. Our theoretical framework builds on sociological concepts in order to study energy consumption at the micro-level. The framework emphasizes the importance of nonfamily organizations and services in the local community as determinants of the transition from use of fuelwood to use of alternative fuels. We use multilevel longitudinal data on household fuel choice and community context from rural Nepal to provide empirical tests of our theoretical model. Results reveal that increased exposure to nonfamily organizations in the local community increases the use of alternative fuels. The findings illustrate key features of human impacts on the local environment and motivate greater incorporation of social organization into research on environmental change.

A micro-level event-centered approach to investigating armed conflict and population responses.

In this article, we construct and test a micro-level event-centered approach to the study of armed conflict and behavioral responses in the general population. Event-centered approaches have been successfully used in the macro-political study of armed conflict but have not yet been adopted in micro-behavioral studies. The micro-level event-centered approach that we advocate here includes decomposition of a conflict into discrete political and violent events, examination of the mechanisms through which they affect behavior, and consideration of differential risks within the population. We focus on two mechanisms: instability and threat of harm. We test this approach empirically in the context of the recent decade-long armed conflict in Nepal, using detailed measurements of conflict-related events and a longitudinal study of first migration, first marriage, and first contraceptive use. Results demonstrate that different conflict-related events independently shaped migration, marriage, and childbearing and that they can simultaneously influence behaviors in opposing directions. We find that violent events increased migration, but political events slowed migration. Both violent and political events increased marriage and contraceptive use net of migration. Overall, this micro-level event-centered approach yields a significant advance for the study of how armed conflict affects civilian behavioral responses.

Social organization, population, and land use.

A new approach to investigation of human influences on the environment identifies social organization as an influence independent of population size, affluence, and technology. The framework also identifies population events, such as births, that influence the environment. The authors use longitudinal, multilevel, mixed-method measures of local land use changes, population dynamics, and social organization to test this framework. These tests reveal that changes in social organization are strongly associated with changes in land use independent of measures of population size, affluence, and technology. Also, local birth events shape local land use changes and key proximate determinants of land use change.