State Social Policies and Social Support Networks: The Unintended Consequences of State Policymaking on Informal Networks in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire

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• The types of help given and received included: Help to pay for hospital or clinic fees; help to pay for medicine; help to receive care from a traditional healer or herbalist; help with the costs of a funeral; help to get engaged or married; help to pay school fees; help to provide school books or supplies; help to provide accommodation; help with food or prepared meals; help with cloth, clothing, or shoes; help with tools; help by working for someone without getting paid; help with land; help to pay a debt; help to start a business; and, lastly, help with anything else that was not already mentioned
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• The range of social ties included: spouse; children; parents; grandparents; siblings; cousin; aunt or uncle; other extended family member; friend; association; church; government; village chief; agricultural worker; landlord; “stranger”; and, other. The task of categorizing specific social ties as “nuclear family” vs. “extended family” was handled carefully in order to deal with concepts that do not originate in the local context and change over the life cycle. For this article, the “nuclear family” core consists of simply the respondent's spouse and children. Then, the “extended family” grows ring by ring, first adding parents, then siblings, grandparents, and finally, aunts and uncles, cousins, and other family members. A reference in this article to “the extended family” indicates all of these rings taken together
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• These five types of help were chosen because they are the most reliable figures in the dataset. These types of help were generally the most memorable because: the crisis was life‐threatening; the gifts were given or received at the same particular times of year (school start, harvest, Christmas and/or Easter); and, with the exception of clothing, the gifts were almost always given in cash. Even though clothing was almost always given in kind, there are set prices for particular kinds of cloth that are commonly known and easy to remember
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• The only characteristic that a comparison of means indicated was statistically significant was the number of children who lived in a larger urban area (significance = 0.013). Ivoirian respondents seemed to have more children living in the city (0.77) while Ghanaian respondents had more of their children living either in the village or in a nearby village or smaller town (only 0.4 living in city). Ironically, the regression coefficients suggest that having children living in an urban area meant that respondents gave more help, not less. Evidently, these urban‐based children are more of a drain on resources, not a boon, to their village‐based families. Many of these children are struggling to survive with menial jobs in the informal sector. Nevertheless, since this particular variable was not consistently significant in the preliminary stages of testing the regression model, it was eliminated from the final round of analysis
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