Conformity and change: community effects on female genital cutting in Kenya.
In this article, I analyze women's decisions to have their daughters circumcised based on data from 7,873 women in Kenya collected in the 1998 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey. I use multilevel models to assess the degree to which women s decisions are correlated with the decisions of other women in their community, in addition to studying the effects of socioeconomic characteristics measured at both the individual and community levels. I find some support for modernization theories, which argue that economic development leads to gradual erosion of the practice of female circumcision. However, more community-level variation is explained by the convention hypothesis, which proposes that the prevalence of female circumcision will decline rapidly once parents see that a critical mass of other parents have stopped circumcising their daughters. I also find substantial variation among different ethnic groups in the pace and onset of the decline of female genital cutting.
Hayford
Sarah R
SR
Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. shayford@pop.upenn.edu
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D019093:Circumcision, Female; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D007630:Kenya; D008875:Middle Aged; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D012922:Social Change; D012927:Social Control, Informal