Could religious faith lead to better outcomes for larger families? It's a question posed by a major research project which was borne out of a local study.
Dr Shaver from the University of Otago says the research will involve four universities from around the world and will look at why members of some religious groups that have more children have better outcomes than expected.
John Shaver from University of Otago Photo: Supplied
He explains that having fewer children is correlated with better outcomes for those children because the parents have more resources to pour into them. Larger families, with fewer resources, tend to have worse outcomes. And yet, some religious groups buck that trend.
“Given that religious people tend to have more children, all else being equal, you’d expect those children to not be as successful – but they appear to be and so we’re trying to find out what it is about religion or religious social networks that might help religious mother achieve higher family sizes without the negative impacts that most individuals would face.”
He says the reason religious people tend to have more children varies across different faiths, but some – including Christianity – have mandates encouraging large families, eg “go forth and multiply.”
“One of the reasons we’re looking at several different religions in different places is to see if the local theological beliefs are part of the reason – but that probably won’t have anything to do with impacting child health. We think that has more to do with social networks that religious people have.
“Mormons, for example, who have a lot of children do not tend to suffer in terms of doing well in school relative to other families with the same number of children and this is likely because Mormons tend to have all sorts of support for parents.”
The study was borne out of a smaller one that Dr Shaver describes as a sort of proof of concept. Using data from an Auckland University longitudinal study they showed that people who are religious but don’t have children of their own were more likely to help out people around them and look after their children – much more so than secular people.
“We don’t know how that impacts children, or if it does at all, or whether or not that can help to explain why some religious groups have more children than others. We showed that maybe these dynamics are going on and it really led to being able to study these dynamics around the world.”
