Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for November 2024, Sylvia Esther Gyan (University of Ghana, Ghana). Her article for Current Sociology ‘Why give birth to many children when you cannot take care of them?’ Determinants of family size among dual-earner couples in Ghana, co-authored with Albert Kpoor, is Free Access this month.

Sylvia Esther Gyan

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

S.E. Gyan: I am a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Ghana. In my current position, I teach courses both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. These include Research Methods, Quantitative Social Research Methods, and Culture and Reproductive Health. My main research interest falls under the Sociology of Health, a sub-discipline in Sociology. Over the years, my research has been in the areas of reproductive health with a particular focus on adolescent sexual and reproductive health, maternal health, and child marriage. My research interest extends to other domains including Family Demography, Gender Studies, Climate Change, and Migration. With a research interest that focuses on women’s well-being, I conduct studies on women in vulnerable situations across the life course. As a researcher, I am interested in contributing to knowledge production and solving societal problems. Hence, I participate in transdisciplinary research, which provides the greatest opportunity for researchers to work with relevant stakeholders on integrative and socially relevant topics oriented toward problem-solving. I have worked with a few interdisciplinary teams of researchers to develop and complete projects and disseminate the results through seminars, conferences, workshops, and the publication of articles, book chapters, blog posts, and policy briefs.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “‘Why give birth to many children when you cannot take care of them?’ Determinants of family size among dual-earner couples in Ghana”?

S.E. Gyan: This article is based on findings from a project jointly funded by the Institute of Labour Economics (IZA) and the UK Government Department for International Development (DFID) to examine the implications of women’s earnings for household division of labour and women’s welfare outcomes in Ghana. In the broader study, we sought to find out if higher women’s bargaining power has implications for their reproductive health, in addition to opportunities for labour market participation.

In this article, we were motivated by our desire to understand the factors influencing fertility decisions among couples in Ghana. Existing literature suggests that in many parts of the developing world, few women have significant control over their decisions relating to childbirth, although too many births, too close together could have significant adverse effects on the health of a woman and her child. Furthermore, in Ghana, the total fertility rate (TFR) declined from over 6 births per woman in 1988 to 4.2 births per woman in 2014. Although this decline is primarily attributed to many factors such as education, urbanization, and cultural factors, fertility in Ghana appears to be stalling. Thus, our interest is to understand the factors influencing fertility decisions among couples in Ghana from their perspective.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

S.E. Gyan: This study explored the factors influencing family size among dual-earner couples in Ghana and observed that reproductive behaviour depended on a series of determinants that are influenced mainly by sociocultural, economic and biological factors as follows:

1. Having children as a couple was an achievement in most families although we observed that the number of children desired or preferred varied for individual couples based on the number they believe they can take good care of.
2. Social esteem is no longer attached to the number of children, but to the quality of care provided for the children.
3. With women increasingly participating in the labour force, both formal and informal, their domestic and reproductive roles are believed to interfere with their paid work, thus work-centred women limited the number of children to minimize its effect on their participation in the labour market.
4. Aside from couples controlling their family size using modern contraceptives, women sometimes make unilateral decisions and actions to control the number of children they have by enrolling in family planning programmes without the knowledge or consent of their spouses. Such acts could be linked to the availability of family planning methods that could be done discreetly as well as women’s economic independence due to their participation in the labour market.
5. Among couples who have fertility issues husbands may have control over their desired family size, and wives have less control over the number of children they prefer or desire.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

S.E. Gyan: Owoo, N. S., Lambon-Quayefio, M. P., Gyan, S. E., & Oduro, A. D. (2022). Women's earnings and domestic work among couples in Ghana. African Review of Economics and Finance, 14(1), 26-55 https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-aref_v14_n1_a2

Owoo, N. S., Lambon-Quayefio, M. P., Gyan, S. E., & Oduro, A. D. (2021). The Effects of Differential Spousal Earnings on Domestic Work and Intimate Partner Abuse in Ghana https://g2lm-lic.iza.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/GLMLIC-Policy-Brief_033-3.pdf

Lambon-Quayefio, M. P., Owoo, N. S., Oduro, A. D. & Gyan, S. E. (2021). The Socioeconomic and Reproductive Health Effects of Unequal Domestic Work on Women in Ghana https://g2lm-lic.iza.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/GLMLIC-Policy-Brief_034-3.pdf