The Malawi Religion Project:

Scholars have recently become increasingly interested in the role religion plays in the responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Here, we present the Malawi Religion Project (MRP), which provides data to examine the relationship between religion and HIV/AIDS through surveys and in-depth interviews with denominational leaders, congregational leaders and congregation members in three districts of rural Malawi. In the paper, we outline existing perspectives on the religion-HIV/AIDS link describe the MRP’s design, implementation and subsequent data; provide initial evidence for a series of general research hypotheses; and describe how these data can be used both to extend explorations of these relationships further and as a model for gathering similar data in other contexts. In particular we highlight the unique possibilities this project provides for analyses that link MRP data to the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project. These linked data produce a multi-level data set covering individuals, congregations and their communities allowing empirical research on religion, HIV/AIDS risk, related behaviors, attitudes and norms.AIDS/HIV, data collection, Malawi, religion

Beyond denomination: The relationship between religion and family planning in rural Malawi

Despite the centrality of religion and fertility to life in rural Africa, the relationship between the two remains poorly understood. The study presented here uses unique integrated individual- and congregational-level data from rural Malawi to examine religious influences on contraceptive use. In this religiously diverse population, we find evidence that the particular characteristics of a congregation—leader’s positive attitudes toward family planning and discussion of sexual morality, which do not fall along broad denominational lines—are more relevant than denominational categories for predicting women’s contraceptive use. We further find evidence for a relationship between religious socialization and contraceptive behavior.family planning, fertility, religion, social interaction, Sub-Saharan Africa

Mobile phones, digital inequality, and fertility: Longitudinal evidence from Malawi

We focus on the relationship between mobile phone ownership and childbearing in south- ern Malawi, showing that mobile phone acquisition is associated with reductions in ideal family size and lower overall parity among phone-owning women compared to their phone-less counterparts

Demography Beyond the Foot

This essay argues demographers must reckon with how Covid-19 data fuels “population chatter,” conversations with others about demographic phenomena where we organize facts through our personal cognitive and moral frameworks

Integrating the Demographic and Health Surveys, IPUMS-I, and TerraPopulus to Explore Mortality and Health Outcomes at the District Level in Ghana, Malawi, and Tanzania

In this paper, we first show how the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) can be integrated with other data sources to expand the types of variables available for analysis of population and health outcomes. Second, we demonstrate one particular example of such integration by modelling the social, physical, and built environment determinants of health outcomes at the district level in Ghana, Malawi, and Tanzania.  To do so, we created district-level measures of a number of variables from the DHS, and then merged them with district-level data from the IPUMS, an environmental data set called TerraPopulus, and other sources.  We find that it is feasible to combine the DHS with other data sources, and that many health and environment indicators are heterogeneous within countries, justifying further analysis at low levels of geography and suggesting benefits to using such techniques to design fine-grained programmatic interventions

Measuring Five Dimensions of Religiosity Across Adolescence

This paper theorizes and tests a latent variable model of adolescent religiosity in which five dimensions of religiosity are interrelated: religious beliefs, religious exclusivity, external religiosity, private practice, and religious salience. Research often theorizes overlapping and independent influences of single items or dimensions of religiosity on outcomes such as adolescent sexual behavior, but rarely operationalizes the dimensions in a measurement model accounting for their associations with each other and across time. We use longitudinal structural equation modeling (SEM) with latent variables to analyze data from two waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion. We test our hypothesized measurement model as compared to four alternate measurement models and find that our proposed model maintains superior fit. We then discuss the associations between the five dimensions of religiosity we measure and how these change over time. Our findings suggest how future research might better operationalize multiple dimensions of religiosity in studies of the influence of religion in adolescence

The role of religious organizations in the HIV crisis of Sub-Saharan Africa

There are important disparities between how HIV transmission, prevention, and mitigation are addressed within sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and how they are understood by the international aid agencies that design and implement interventions to combat AIDS in this region. Contending that local responses to the AIDS epidemic hinge on a religious framework, this dissertation examines the relationship between religion and HIV risk at both the individual and collective levels in the setting of rural Malawi - a religiously diverse country with high levels of both religious participation and HIV prevalence. This dissertation advances the Durkheimian idea that participation in harmful behaviors is reduced in places where particular religions or religious rituals are widely practiced. Specifically, it addresses the associations between religion and (1) HIV prevention, (2) actual HIV status, and (3) perceived obligations to support families affected by AIDS. The relationships are assessed by employing multiple methodologies and data sources including participant observation data from religious services, in-depth interviews with religious leaders and lay people, and large-scale survey data. This dissertation provides the first empirical assessment of what religious leaders in SSA say and do about HIV in their communities and shows that many have assumed an activist role in combating the epidemic. The relevant practices religious leaders engage in include: preaching explicitly about AIDS on a regular basis, privately advising members to use condoms, actively policing the sexual behavior of their members -- visiting those suspected to be at risk of contracting the disease and to confront them about their sexual behavior, and advising divorce as a strategy for HIV prevention in cases where a member is likely to be infected by an unfaithful spouse. By synthesizing insights from demographic studies of contextual effects on sexual behavior with the notion of "moral communities" from the sociology of religion, this dissertation emphasizes the importance of conceptualizing religion as a supra-individual phenomenon with important implications for the health of populations.Sociolog

Religious teachings and influences on the ABCs of HIV prevention in Malawi

This study examines the relationship between religion and HIV risk behaviors in rural Malawi, giving special attention to the role of religious congregations, the organizations with which rural Africans have most immediate contact. It draws on 2004 data from a household survey in 3 districts (N = 3386), and quantitative and qualitative data collected in 2005 from 187 leaders of religious congregations previously identified in the survey. The first aim is descriptive - to identify overall patterns and variations in what religious leaders in rural Malawi teach about HIV and about sexual behavior in light of the epidemic. The second aim is to assess how religious organizations impact the behavior of individual members. I examine three outcomes that correspond with the ABCs of HIV prevention: abstinence (for never married persons), fidelity (for married persons), and condom use (among sexually active persons). Multi-level models reveal that religious affiliation and involvement are not correlated with the sexual behavior of congregation members, but that beliefs about appropriate sexual behavior and particular congregational characteristics are associated with adherence to A, B, and C. Individuals belonging to congregations led by clergy who 1) frequently deliver formal messages about HIV, 2) monitor the sexual behavior of members, and 3) privately encourage condom use report greater adherence to the ABCs of HIV prevention, suggesting that religious congregations are relevant for the sexual behavior of members and for better understanding the forces shaping individual behavior in the context of the African AIDS epidemic.HIV Religion Sexual behavior Sub-Saharan Africa Malawi Risk behaviors