Serial marriages and AIDS in Masaka District

In the process of studying the functioning of households under the conditions of the AIDS epidemic in the districts of Masaka, Kabarole and Rukungiri, information was collected on the marital history of persons aged 12 years and above who had ever been involved in a regular union or marriage. That information allows the discussion of the pattern of marital mobility and the exploration of the possible links between serial marriages and the dynamics of the current epidemic. Serial marriages can be defined as the participation in a sequence of regular partnerships or unions. By this definition, males in polygamous unions are involved in the practice of serial marriages in that they go through the formation of regular unions more than once in their lifetime and are often involved in more than one such union at a time. In the case of females, serial marriage takes the form of transition from first to second and subsequent unions within a monogamous or polygamous framework. This paper describes the pattern of these serial marriages, the causes of the dissolution of unions, and the relationship between the observed patterns and selected social and demographic factors such as sex, residence, education and the household-level experience of a previous HIV/AIDS related illness or death. Particular attention is paid to the role of death of spouse and especially of death from AIDS in the dissolution of unions. Apart from the use of basic descriptive statistics, a hierarchical log linear regression is carried out and the tests of partial association between the fact of serial marriage and selected variables are presented.