Shifting Partnership Ideals with Online Technologies among Unmarried Women in India

Koyel Sarkar, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Luca Maria Pesando, New York University Abu Dhabi
Sabino Kornrich, Emory University

This study complements existing scholarship in family sociology and digital demography by investigating the role of digital technologies in shaping partnership ideals among unmarried women in India. We build on the premise that, through faster communication, effective information dissemination, and reciprocal exchange of norms and ideals, recurrent exposure to globalized cultural scripts through the Internet may shape views and opinions regarding different aspects of family life. Leveraging new data from a primary representative survey of unmarried yet partnered women living in cities across 20 states, we find that daily Internet use is positively and significantly associated with modern partnership ideals. Moreover, we show that accessing the Internet independently – vis-à-vis through a shared device – is what matters the most, and that results are stronger among highly educated individuals. We offer prima facie evidence that these findings can be deemed causal complementing our results with an Instrumental-Variable approach leveraging digital geographical information. Our findings reveal that digital technologies may be gradually contributing to shifting views about marriage and family formation, even in a context such as India which has traditionally exhibited strong resistance to modernization forces, at least in the realm of the family.

Keywords: Families, Unions and Households, Digital and computational demography, Children, Adolescents, and Youth, Gender Dynamics

See paper.