Arland Thornton’s research while affiliated with University of Michigan and other places

Previous research has investigated how DI beliefs and values have been disseminated in the Turkish context. However, no studies in Turkey have examined how individuals’ behaviors or behavioral intentions are affected by peoples’ support for these DI beliefs. This study provides the first analysis of the effects of DI on behavioral intentions in Turkey. Our findings show that, at least for fertility intentions, people’s valuation of DI features may have a bigger influence than their behavioral beliefs in predicting fertility intentions. This finding supports previous DI research emphasizing the central importance of DI beliefs and values.

This article investigates American Indian literacy in the United States. Using 1900 through 1930 decennial census data, literacy levels and trends in reading and writing are documented for this period and for people born from 1820 through 1920, providing a large-scale historical picture of American Indian literacy. The pace and extent of literacy is documented from very low for those born during the early 1800s to fairly universal for those born during the early 1900s. Increases in Native literacy are demonstrated to have been closely related to birth year, with successive birth years having higher levels of literacy. Little evidence was found that increases from 1900 to 1930 happened because people increased their literacy after the school years and as they matured through adulthood. A close birth year level relationship between literacy and one year of school attainment was also found.

This article examines a half-century of trends in family attitudes and beliefs in the United States, including attitudes toward gender, marriage, childbearing, cohabitation, sex outside marriage, divorce, and same-sex relations. These trends are viewed through the lens of developmental idealism. We also describe how the developmental idealism framework applies to Western contexts generally and the United States specifically. We trace family attitudes from the 1960s through 2018 using four data sources: the Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children, Monitoring the Future, the General Social Survey, and the International Social Survey Programme. We find profound and largely consistent changes in Americans’ attitudes. We argue these changes can be understood as the expansion of developmental idealism in the United States. Americans increasingly endorsed family attributes long understood as modern under developmental idealism, as well as attributes more recently viewed as modern through extensions of freedom and equality. At the same time, sizable majorities remained committed to marriage and children. While Americans increasingly supported all individuals’ freedom to choose among a diversity of family behaviors, most continued to view marriage and children favorably in their own lives.

Using data from a national survey of urban Turks, we examine whether people report an understanding and acceptance of developmental idealism (DI) messages about the relationship between development and family characteristics. We examine two different aspects of DI, which the recent literature distinguish as original DI versus new DI. An important contribution of our paper is its focus on a detailed conceptualization and measurement of DI. We constructed six different scales that crosscut the original-versus-new distinction and the dimensions of correlation, causation, and expectations. We find that the vast majority of Turks endorse most DI beliefs, with variations in responses between the original and new aspects. Our analyses also suggest that region of residence, ethnicity, education, marriage and fertility, age, gender, and secularism are substantially, in some cases unexpectedly, related to DI beliefs. More educated people generally endorse DI less than those with less education, and the effects of marital and fertility status are also in a direction different from our theoretical predictions. Furthermore, the estimated effects of the explanatory variables on DI vary across the six scales, providing evidence that understanding and acceptance of DI beliefs vary by the original-versus-new distinction and across the three dimensions. Thus, this work provides evidence that DI is not a unified package of ideas but a network of schemas related to each other with varying strength.

This paper examines a half century of trends in family attitudes and beliefs in the United States, including attitudes towards gender, marriage, childbearing, cohabitation, sex outside marriage, divorce, and same-sex relations. We trace attitudes from the 1960s through the 2010s using four data sources: Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children, Monitoring the Future, General Social Survey, and International Social Science Project. We find profound and largely consistent changes in Americans’ attitudes. We argue these changes demonstrate the expansion of developmental idealism in the United States. Americans increasingly endorsed longstanding “modern” family attributes, as well as newly “modern” attributes viewed as extensions of freedom and equality and linked to seemingly natural progress of society. At the same time, sizable majorities remained committed to marriage and children. While Americans increasingly supported all individuals’ freedom to choose among a diversity of family behaviors, most continued to choose marriage and children for themselves.

Do timing attitudes—subjective evaluations of particular ages as good ages to marry—influence entrance into marriage? To address this question, we formulated an intergenerational model of how parents’ and children’s timing attitudes influence children’s marriage behavior. We theorized that both parents’ and children’s timing attitudes influence expectations of when children will marry. In turn, both parents’ and children’s marital expectations would influence children’s actual entrance into marriage. We tested the model using intergenerational panel data from Nepal collected in 2008–2014. Timing attitudes of young people and their parents did influence expectations, as well as entrance into marriage. Young people’s own attitudes were more influential than their parents’ attitudes in determining children’s expectations, but not behavior. Further, while the influence of parents was relatively even, mothers appear slightly more influential than fathers.

This paper brings together both theoretically and empirically two strands of social science research: migration and developmental idealism. The paper is motivated by the fact that there are extensive bodies of research about migration and about developmental idealism, but almost no discussion in the literature about how they might be interconnected. We present theoretical arguments concerning the influence of migration in distributing developmental idealism around the world and in developmental idealism being a force influencing the migration decisions of people. We also provide an empirical investigation of how variation in developmental idealism may have been an influence on migration and choice of migration destinations in Nepal. Thus, we extend the developmental idealism literature to include migration and the migration literature to include developmental idealism.

We investigate influences of fatalistic beliefs on domestic and international migration in Nepal, positing that fatalistic beliefs may affect decisions to migrate and where to locate. Fatalism is the belief that human outcomes are preordained by forces outside of one’s power and control. Because of its relationship with effort and innovation, fatalism may be an important factor in people’s decision to migrate and destination choice. We expect that fatalistic beliefs encourage or discourage migration depending upon societal expectations to migrate and the relative ease of migration to different destinations. Our empirical analysis relies on migration histories of respondents from the Chitwan Valley Family Study. Results from multinomial logistic regression models provide evidence that fatalistic beliefs increase overall migration propensity and has both positive and negative destination-specific effects. Fatalistic beliefs increase Nepalis’ odds of migrating to destinations that are, relatively speaking, easier to access, but decrease the odds of migrating to destinations with higher barriers to entry.

The study of social capital has been one of the strongest areas of recent advance in migration research, but there are still many questions about how it works and why it has varying effects in studies of different places. In this article, we address the contextual variation in social capital’s effects on migration by considering migration brokers. We argue that destinations for which migration is logistically difficult to arrange give rise to brokerage industries and hypothesize that brokers, in turn, substitute for the informational capital typically provided by social networks. Our empirical tests in Nepal support this narrative, showing that social networks matter for migration to destinations where brokers are not available and have little discernible effect on migration to brokered destinations. Our results suggest that migration research should consider the growing role of brokerage agencies, that theorizations of social capital more broadly must contend with how it is delimited by brokers, and that social scientists might also consider other consequences that can arise from these migration brokers that are increasingly common in many countries and provide a marketized replacement for social capital in some cases.

While studies commonly show differences in out-migration between ethnic groups, ethnicity most often features no more than a side note in the emigration literature, and we have very little insight about why people from different ethnic groups migrate at different rates. Understanding ethnic differences in migration rates and destination choice has important implications for the present-day and future potential for either dampening or exacerbating ethnic discrimination and opportunity structures. Building on existing migration theory, we identify three possible mechanisms through which ethnicity might influence out-migration rates and destination choice: human and economic capital, contemporary discrimination, and historical legacies that are perpetuated through social networks. Our empirical investigation uses longitudinal (panel) survey data from Nepal and we find that all three of these mechanisms likely influence out-migration and destinations of the five major ethno-caste groups. However, we show that historical legacy and human and economic capital emerge as the key drivers of ethnic differences in out-migration here. We discuss what these results mean for migration studies as well as the potential for the institution of migration to affect patterns of ethno-caste-based disadvantage in Nepal. The theoretical basis and empirical evidence from our study also suggest ways to understand the reasoning for and consequences of ethnic and racial differentials in migration patterns in other areas of the world.