Kristin Snopkowski
Is the Helping Behavior of Grandparents Predicted by Need? Evidence from Indonesia
Kristin Snopkowski (London School of Hygiene And Tropical Medicine)
Rebecca Sear (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)
The presented paper has been removed at the request of the authors
Many thanks to the discussant for their comments on our manuscript – we greatly appreciate your time. I entirely agree with your point that analysis of large-scale national datasets can lose important detail and nuance in terms of what actually happens ‘on the ground’, especially when dealing with a diverse country such as Indonesia, and will read the paper you recommend with great interest. But analyses of large-scale datasets do allow us to investigate overarching patterns in the data, and we have spent considerable time investigating whether the patterns we observe are consistent across regions and ethnic groups, precisely because we want to reassure ourselves (and our readers) that we are drawing out patterns that are meaningful, and not just across a small sub-section of Indonesian society. As Kristin notes in her response, in this particular analysis the patterns we observe appear to be rather consistent.
In other work, we are explicitly investigating cross-cultural variation in kin influences on demographic outcomes, because we are interested in determining how and why kin relationships should differ between groups – we have a couple of other papers in this seminar which tackle this variation. Ideally, some qualitative, ethnographic analysis would form part of this larger project on kin influences on fertility – unfortunately none in the group working on the project currently have the expertise or time to do this. If any readers with appropriate expertise are interested in collaboration then please get in touch!