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While it takes different forms, religion is ubiquitous in cultures around the world. How does it shape families?

A massive research project called is exploring how religious life potentially weaves networks of cooperation that allow children to flourish. 91���� Assistant Professor of Anthropology Laure Spake, who joined the project as a postdoctoral fellow, is among an international team of nearly 100 researchers and assistants.

So far, they have collected data in five different study settings: Pittsburgh, India, Bangladesh and the Gambia; study subjects include Christians, Hindus and Muslims. Spake conducted fieldwork in The Gambia, a largely Muslim country where families typically have more than five children.

The group’s most recent article appeared in the American Journal of Human Biology, and more are in the pipeline.

“Its premise is looking at religion and its role in structuring family, family life and success,” Spake explained.

Having children can strain parental resources; the more children a family has, the less time, money and effort are invested in each child. This is true in other animal species, too, Spake pointed out: large family sizes are associated with slightly worse outcomes for each individual offspring.

Religious families are, on average, larger than non-religious families; in the United States, the average differential is one child. However, children from religious families don’t face the downgrade in outcomes when compared to children from non-religious families of similar size. Why?

Research in anthropology, psychology and sociology shows that individuals who attend religious services together are more likely to help each other in daily life. The project theorizes that this cooperation may extend to childcare, giving children more potential resources than they would otherwise have.

Because most families in The Gambia are religious, the researchers didn’t expect to see any effect of religiosity on family size or support. However, the recent paper shows the opposite, as its title indicates: “Religious Involvement is Associated with Higher Fertility and Lower Maternal Investment, but More Alloparental Support Among Gambian Mothers.”

“Even in these settings where everybody is religious, being seen as more religious is going to have some benefits for you,” Spake said.

A biological anthropologist, Spake’s main area of interest is child growth and development. In The Gambia, she worked with a team of experts in fertility, demography and religion, each sharing their expertise, she said.

An earlier paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B addressed the structure of the massive project, which encompasses five regions with multiple religions and different customs. Fieldwork at the varied sites begins with a month of acclimation, enabling researchers to understand what religiosity means in each locale, how its inhabitants express religiosity and what cooperation needs exist.

In Pittsburgh, researchers conducted focus groups with Christian women, asking questions about social support; common answers included carpooling help. Driving the kids to soccer practice is a problem that doesn’t exist in The Gambia, where children walk to the village with their friends; instead, support needs include farmwork or food and money in times of scarcity.

“That kind of ethnographic fieldwork allowed us to tailor our research question to each individual context, to really capture what the local variation would be,” said Spake, who took several students with her to The Gambia this year for a follow-up round of data collection. “It was a great learning experience for me because we spent so much time getting to know people and the community. When we look at the data, I know the cultural context.”

Future papers will expand findings from The Gambia to the other field sites. Researchers are also investigating whether a mother’s religiosity signals her trustworthiness and willingness to reciprocate help, which could account for religion’s benefits, and whether the level of or type of religiosity has an impact.

Ultimately, the project documents how families are situated within broader webs of cooperation. While public health interventions typically focus on the nuclear family, these larger webs play an important role in promoting health and especially child health.

That’s true here in the United States as well as The Gambia or Bangladesh. In Pittsburgh, one interview subject was going through a divorce and recognized that she needed help—both with childcare and in making sense of her life. She joined a church and found the support she needed, Spake said.

“We think of the traditional family as a nuclear one, a set of parents raising a set of children, but we forget that parents are getting support from people outside the nuclear family, whether that’s related individuals, grandparents, aunts and uncles, or neighbors, friends or people from church or other social groups,” Spake said.