Saturday, April 20, 2024
4/20/2024
PROJECT SUMMARY Solo male migration is a strategy adopted by many families to diversify risks and to improve household economic conditions. Millions of women in developing countries are geographically separated from their husbands due to the massive flow of internal and international labor migration. Migration is viewed positively in general given the economic benefits brought by remittances, which can improve the nutrition and access to healthcare for family members staying in the origin communities. However, the psychosocial implications of male absence for the left-behind wives have not been fully understood. It is unclear whether the economic benefits from remittances could compensate for the possible detrimental health effects of the increased workload, emotional strain, and the lack of social support subsequent to the husbands’ migration. Only a handful of studies have examined the health effect of male absence due to migration on left-behind wives and they reported mixed findings. Even less is known about the mechanisms through which male outmigration influences the health of left-behind wives or how the health impact of male migration on left-behind wives vary by various migratory patterns and by the amount of social support received by the wives. This proposed project will examine the impact of male outmigration on the health of left-behind wives, using two waves of longitudinal data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) collected in 2004-5 and 2011-12. Previous research on this topic has been hampered by the inability to fully address migration selectivity and the lack of data on the characteristics of migration. Relying on the rich dataset from the IHDS, we will be able to carry out several innovative analyses in this study. First, we will examine the effect of husbands’ migration status and migration characteristics on the health of left-behind wives in India, while accounting for migration selectivity with regard to pre-migration individual and family characteristics. We explicitly takes into account the selection process of outmigration using propensity score analysis. Furthermore, we will sort out the role of multiple aspects of migration characteristics, including the amount of remittances, migration duration, and the frequency of home visit. Second, we will test the potentially offsetting mechanisms through which men’s migration influences the health of left-behind wives, which include women’s access to economic resources, physical autonomy, decision-making power, work hours, and household responsibilities. Third, we will examine how the health effects of male migration on left-behind wives are conditioned on the amount of social support received by women from the family and the community. We expect to find that social support from the male-side extended family, women’s natal family, and social groups can attenuate the potential detrimental effect of male absence on the health of left-behind wives.
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