Dr. Dawn Brown Neill (California Polytechnic State University) will undertake research on how urban ecology effects changes in children's diet, education, and activity levels, through a focus on parental investment in urbanizing ecologies. High levels of internal migration to urban centers are occurring throughout the developing world. Urban expansion introduces novel ecological conditions that produce shifts in diet, education options, and work and fertility patterns. Research has demonstrated a strong link between urbanization and increasing overweight in children and adults. Similarly, demographic transition theory has linked modernization to decreases in offspring quantity. By focusing on parental behavior, this research will contribute to understanding how demographic transition, nutrition transitions, and urbanization are interconnected.
The researcher will test the proposition that ecological conditions associated with urbanization will stimulate different patterns of nutritional and educational investment in children, given individual-level costs and benefits. She will carry out the resarch as a cross-sectional study in village, peri-urban, and urban areas of Fiji. The environmental variables will be elements of urbanization and the responsive behavioral traits will be parental investment outcomes that impact the quality and quantity of offspring, given the socio-cultural context of Fijian urban and village life. The researcher will examine parental investment decision-making by collecting cross-sectional quantitative data on diet, anthropometrics, family size, land use, remittances, education, and work activity measures of children and adults. These data will be complemented with qualitative interview data on migration, identity, and kinship and family practices.
The research is important because its findings can inform public health and policy programs on intra-household dynamics involved in the linkages between nutrition, education, and reproductive decisions, on the one hand, and and child welfare, on the other. It also will help to develop more ecologically sensitive theory for understanding parental decision-making. Results of this study will shed light on the dynamics of internal migration and urbanization and the related consequences to population health and rural development policy.
The research project has generated many interesting outcomes related to both the intellectual merit of the research and its broader impacts. Though data analysis is still ongoing, qualitative findings indicate that parental investment decisions among indigenous Fijians do respond to variable ecological settings. The nutrition and educational decisions made by rural and urban Fijian parents seem to reflect their long-term investment strategies for children. Theoretically, the research has generated both qualitative and quantitative data that will enhance a human behavioral ecology-driven approach to understanding linkages between demographic and nutrition transition via parental investment. Qualitative data also highlight the importance of cultural in parental investment decision-making. These data clearly indicate the importance of maintaining a tie to traditional lifeways among many Fijians. These data will be analyzed comparatively with existing data on rural- and urban-living Indo-Fijians in Fiji. This comparative analysis will contribute a rich body of findings to the literature on human behavioral ecology both because of the context of urbanization and because of the emphasis on culture as well as ecology. Results of this study are also well positioned to shed light on the dynamics of internal migration and urbanization and the related consequences to population health and rural development policy in Fiji. Additionally, the project provided research experiences for four undergraduate anthropology majors in Fiji through the REU program.
