Is It the Timing? Short-Term Mobility and Coital Frequency in Agbogbloshie, Ghana
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Is It the Timing? Short‑Term Mobility and Coital Frequency in Agbogbloshie, Ghana Susan Cassels1 · Kevin M. Mwenda2 · Adriana A. E. Biney3 · Samuel M. Jenness4 Received: 12 November 2019 / Revised: 31 July 2020 / Accepted: 1 August 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Short-term mobility is often associated with increased sexual risk behavior. Mobile individuals often have higher rates of sexual risk behavior compared to non-mobile individuals, but the reasons why are not clear. Using monthly retrospective panel data from 202 men and 282 women in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, we tested whether short-term mobility was associated with changes in coital frequency, and whether the association was due to the act of travel in the given month (e.g., enabling higher risk behavior), the reason for travel, or an individual’s travel propensity at other times in the year. Overnight travel specifically to visit family or friends, or for education, health, or other reasons, was associated with increased coital frequency for men. However, men with higher travel propensities had lower overall coital frequency and the act of traveling enabled more sex only for the most frequent male travelers. Men who seldom traveled had much higher coital frequency, but the act of traveling was not associated with additional sex acts. For women, travel for education, health, or other reasons increased coital frequency. Occasional female travelers had slightly more sex acts compared to non-mobile women, and the act of traveling for these women was associated with slight increases in coital frequency, supporting the enabling hypothesis. Highly mobile women had fewer sex acts per month on average. Our findings suggest that mobility characteristics measured on a broad temporal scale, as well as the reason for mobility, are important to understand the relationship between short-term mobility and sexual behavior. Keywords Circular migration · Health · Sexual risk behavior · Ghana · Temporal scale
Introduction Short-term mobility is often associated with changes in individual risk behavior for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STI). In the field of migration and HIV, a number of studies have shown positive associations between mobility and sexual risk behavior conducive to HIV compared to nonmobile individuals, such as substance abuse, inconsistent condom use, and paying for sex (Abdullah, Ebrahim, Fielding, & Morisky, 2004), especially in sub-Saharan Africa (Brockerhoff * Susan Cassels [email protected] 1
Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106‑4060, USA
2
Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
3
Regional Institute for Population Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, Accra, Ghana
4
Department of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
& Biddlecom, 1999; Kishamawe et al., 2006; Kwena, Camlin, Shisanya, Mwanzo, & Bukusi, 2013; Lurie et al., 2003).
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