male pregnancy symptoms in urban Colombia

Research on men's pregnancy symptoms (couvade) typically seeks to explicate the meaning of the various symptoms for those presumed to be suffering. This paper considers the significance of such symptoms as reported by a group of pregnant women for their male partners. It is hypothesized that women with few sources of extraconjugal social support report partners' symptoms more often than those with more abundant social resources because such women are more dependent on their partners. This paper therefore examines how illness symptoms are differentially labeled by individuals in dissimilar social situations . [conjugal roles, women's roles, social networks, urbanization, Colombia, Latin America]