The Value of Children in Urban and Rural India : Cultural Background and Empirical Results

Abstract

With its population of over 1 billion people India is the country with the world's second largest population. While the original value of children (VOC-) study from the 1970s (Arnold et al. 1975) did not include samples from India, samples from rural as well as urban India are included in the current interdisciplinary and cross-cultural project "Value of Children and Intergenerational Relations" (Nauck & Trommsdorff, 2001; Trommsdorff & N auck, 2001). Of eourse these samples drawn from Varanasi and from villages about 100 km from Varanasi cannot be representative for a country where there are 17 official languages (in different regions) and where an approximate number of 1500 languages and dialects exist. Nevertheless, this study can give insight into women's family-related and child-related attitudes and values in a typical Indian city as well as in a non-mainstream group of villagers in Northern India. The current chapter has several objectives. The first is to give a general overview over the cultural background of India and a description of mainstream and peripheral cultural groups in Indian society. Besides this, the traditional and the current situation of the family and of parent-child relationships in India are introduced. After this general introduction we give a detailed report of the data collection in the rural and urban sites and present demographic background information of the samples in the study. In the empirical part, some basic analyses regarding the value-of-children concept and other fertility-related attitudes are presented. First, we explore the dimensionality of the VOC-construct in India. On the basis of the dimensions found in this analysis the four different samples in the study are compared: a 3-generation sample consisting of grandmothers, their daughters, and the daughters' adolescent children as well as an additional sample of younger mothers. In a final part, grandmothers and mothers are compared with respect to further fertility-related measures attitudes towards typical sizes of small, large, and ideal families. All comparisons are carried out between the respective rural and urban groups as well in order to obtain an overall pattern of similarities and differences in child-related attitudes and values over generations and regional group membership in India.