Maternal Household Decision-Making Autonomy and Adolescent Education in Honduras

Maternal decision-making autonomy has been linked to positive outcomes for children’s health and well-being early in life in low- and middle-income countries throughout the world. However, there is a dearth of research examining if and how maternal autonomy continues to influence children’s outcomes into adolescence and whether it impacts other domains of children’s lives beyond health, such as their education. The goal of this study was to determine whether high maternal decision-making was associated with school enrollment for secondary school-aged youth in Honduras. Further, we aimed to assess whether the relationships between maternal autonomy and school enrollment varied by adolescents’ environmental contexts and individual characteristics such as gender. Our analytical sample included 6579 adolescents ages 12–16 living with their mothers from the Honduran Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2011–2012. We used stepwise logistic regression models to investigate the association between maternal household decision-making autonomy and adolescents’ school enrollment. Our findings suggest that adolescents, especially girls, benefit from their mothers’ high decision-making autonomy. Findings suggest that maternal decision-making autonomy promotes adolescents’ school enrollment above and beyond other maternal, household, and regional influences.     

Errors in Recalling Childhood Socio-economic Status: The Role of Anchoring and Household Formation in South Africa

In the absence of longitudinal data that track individuals over an extended period of time, information on childhood socio-economic status can be provided by questions that ask adults to recall their parents’ education or their economic status at childhood. The usefulness of these data, however, requires that people are willing to report this information, and that these reports do not vary systematically over time, for example in response to changes in current circumstances. In this paper, we evaluate recall data for South Africa, collected from the same adults in the first two waves of a national panel survey. We show that the data, particularly on father’s education, are compromised by very low and selective response, reflecting the fragmented nature of many South African families. Among those who do provide information, parental education is reported more consistently over time than the subjective appraisals of childhood economic status. However, we find also that both sets of indicators are sensitive to changes in current income, which would be consistent with anchoring effects. Furthermore changes in subjective appraisals of the past are highly correlated with changes in subjective appraisals of the present.     

Crowding and reactions to uncontrollable events

The current study sought to test the consequences associated with misattributing uncontrollable events to crowding. Results showed that when density is a salient cue, greater crowding attributions were made when individuals were exposed to uncontrollable as opposed to controllable outcomes. In addition, performance deficits were found for individuals who were exposed to uncontrollable outcomes, indicated high crowding, and were administered a subsequent task in a nondense setting. The results are discussed in relation to the learned helplessness model as well as studies investigating the aftereffects of stress on human performance.The authors would like to thank Claude Steele for his comments on an earlier draft. Requests for reprints should be sent to David Kuykendall, Department of Psychology, NI-25, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195.     

儿童早期照顾与教育:当前状况与我国的政策选择

20世纪90年代以来,儿童早期照顾与教育在世界各国得到普遍关注。数据分析发现,在我国,学龄前儿童主要由家庭成员(尤其是母亲以及同住的祖父母,或者虽未住在一起但仍可帮忙的祖父母)提供照顾。学龄前儿童接受托幼机构照顾的比例仍较低。相对而言,农村儿童、经济状况较差家庭的儿童、年龄较小的儿童接受托幼照护服务的可能性更低。这一现象背后隐含了儿童在早期照顾与教育服务的质量和获得方面的不平等,不利于儿童人力资本的积累和社会公平的实现。我国2010年以来关于学前教育的新政策为改变这一状况提供了契机。然而,要全面解决儿童发展的不平等问题,需要在政策内容与配套措施方面做出更多努力。     

Nurturing Care for Early Childhood Development: Path to Improving Child Outcomes in Africa

Population Research and Policy Review - The importance of early childhood development has been on the radar of social scientists for decades, yet its connection to global development potential is...     

Impact of Mentors During Adolescence on Outcomes Among Gay Young Adults

ABSTRACT

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement study datasets, this study examined whether natural mentoring relationships during adolescence were associated with young adult outcomes among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) persons. Outcomes in three domains were investigated: education and employment, psychological wellbeing, and substance use and abuse. Results indicated that LGB persons reporting natural mentors during adolescence were about three times as likely to graduate from high school as those without. Discussion surrounds strategies to foster mentoring relationships within the school environment or community.     

The Effects of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on the Educational Outcomes of Undocumented Students

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is the first large-scale immigration policy to affect undocumented immigrants in the United States in decades and offers eligible undocumented youth temporary relief from deportation as well as renewable work permits. Although DACA has improved the economic conditions and mental health of undocumented immigrants, we do not know how DACA improves the social mobility of undocumented immigrants through its effect on educational attainment. We use administrative data on students attending a large public university to estimate the effect of DACA on undocumented students’ educational outcomes. The data are unique because they accurately identify students’ legal status, account for individual heterogeneity, and allow separate analysis of students attending community colleges versus four-year colleges. Results from difference-in-difference estimates demonstrate that as a temporary work permit program, DACA incentivizes work over educational investments but that the effect of DACA on educational investments depends on how easily colleges accommodate working students. At four-year colleges, DACA induces undocumented students to make binary choices between attending school full-time and dropping out of school to work. At community colleges, undocumented students have the flexibility to reduce course work to accommodate increased work hours. Overall, the results suggest that the precarious and temporary nature of DACA creates barriers to educational investments.     

论教育对中国农村家庭生产活动和收入的作用

文章利用农村家庭户的调查数据,分析了教育对中国农村家庭生产活动和收入的作用。研究结果表明,教育能显著促进农村家庭对非农业活动的参与,但对农业活动的参与率基本不起作用,并且当文化程度达到一定水平时,家庭还有脱离农业经营的倾向。无论对于农业还是非农业,教育对收入的作用始终是正向的,而且随着受教育程度的提高而上升。在非农业活动中,教育对劳务性活动参与的作用要高于对家庭非农业经营活动参与的作用。教育水平提高不仅能带来农村家庭收入的增长,而且还能在某种程度上降低农村收入分布的不平等。     

WTO与户籍制度改革

WTO的基本原则就是开放市场，促进贸易自由化。随着加入WTO，中国的对外开放必然进一步扩大，但这并不仅仅意味着可能的外贸依存度的提高和更多外资的引进，还要求中国经济比较优势的重新定位。因缺乏比较优势，……     

Child and Household Deprivation: A Relationship Beyond Household Socio-demographic Characteristics

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on poverty and social exclusion by analysing the type of deprivation of the household where the child lives and the level of deprivation that child experiences. Using the EU-SILC 2009 module on deprivation for Spain, we find that the level of child deprivation varies among household types, that is, even after controlling for the socio-economic characteristics of the household and parents, the lack of certain items at the household level induces a more intense child deprivation. Therefore, we can conclude that there exists an association between child deprivation and the household deprivation profile that surpasses the socio-demographic characteristics of the household and parents.     

Household skills and low wages

Household skills provide job skills when tasks in jobs and household production are similar and jobs produce substitutes for home-made services. Opportunity costs of higher education are foregone earnings during schooling and foregone household production while studying and later in life. I show that individuals in jobs requiring household skills accept lower wage rates than traditional human capital theory predicts, and that individuals with low household skills tend to enter higher education. According to these results, declining household skills may have contributed to the observed increasing demand for higher education by women.

Household decisions and equivalence scales

Considering an economy with a private good and a household good with a variable degree of publicness, we examine the consequences of two extreme decision rules: (1) the cooperative model, where households maximize the welfare of their members, and (2) the noncooperative model, where each household’s member maximizes her own utility. While publicness of the household good is necessary and sufficient for economies of size to exist and to increase with family size under cooperation, it is shown that this no longer holds in the absence of cooperation. On the other hand, the cooperative rule leads to less generous scales than the noncooperative one.      

Incarceration and Household Asset Ownership

A considerable literature documents the deleterious economic consequences of incarceration. However, little is known about the consequences of incarceration for household assets—a distinct indicator of economic well-being that may be especially valuable to the survival of low-income families—or about the spillover economic consequences of incarceration for families. In this article, we use longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine how incarceration is associated with asset ownership among formerly incarcerated men and their romantic partners. Results, which pay careful attention to the social forces that select individuals into incarceration, show that incarceration is negatively associated with ownership of a bank account, vehicle, and home among men and that these consequences for asset ownership extend to the romantic partners of these men. These associations are concentrated among men who previously held assets. Results also show that post-incarceration changes in romantic relationships are an important pathway by which even short-term incarceration depletes assets.     

Household structure and housing needs

This paper is mainly derived from the material presented in the preceding article by S. P. Brown. Indeed, while the previous analysis is of considerable intrinsic interest, the hypothetical population was constructed and its family distribution was shown for the purpose of providing a basis for estimates of housing needs. For several reasons it appeared to be essential to have such a basis. First, any housing programme has to take the future, as well as the present, distribution of households by type and size into account. Secondly, such a programme has to be designed so as not to prevent household formation—there should be dwellings for all potential households, so that involuntary doubling-up need not occur. Thirdly, most residential areas should have dwellings for an eventually stable population, that is, for one which has variety of age groups and of household types, and also fair stability of housing demand. Estimates of the distribution of potential ‘households’ could be derived from the ‘family’ distribution of the hypothetical population which reflects current demographic trends. Thus although this population is a ‘hypothetical’ one, it provides a realistic premise for considering housing needs, and because it is a ‘stationary’ one, it provides an especially suitable premise. Moreover, since the demographic characteristics of its ‘families’ and therefore of its potential households were established in far greater detail than has ever been the case in sample surveys of existing households, it was possible to classify households in the terms which appear to be most appropriate for the first draft of a housing programme, irrespective of social and economic variations in demand.

The first stage in following up Mr Brown's analysis was the conversion of ‘families’ into ‘households’. Two examples of the possible household distribution of the hypothetical population are presented. Example A, which gives a realistic, but not extreme, picture of the conversion of families into households, is used for the subsequent detailed analysis, while broader figures for distribution B are also included.

In the second stage the various types of household had to be distinguished. For estimating housing needs, two interrelated criteria of household classification are relevant—first, the stage in the life of a household, especially appropriate in considering space requirements; secondly, the age composition of households, which largely determines the type of dwelling needed.

The detailed distribution of households by size and type, based on this classification, is further translated into a distribution of dwellings by type and size. For this purpose, additional assumptions about the number of rooms and the type of dwelling needed by households of various types are introduced and applied to the hypothetical population, both to household distributions A and B. These assumptions are not based on accepted standards, nor do they suggest standards. They are merely used for the purpose of illustrating a possible method of estimating housing needs on the basis of a detailed picture of household structure. They are further designed to represent one possible compromise between economy in dwelling distribution, on the one hand, and flexibility of space for individual households, on the other.

In the final sections of the paper, the implications of the dwelling distributions here presented are discussed in relation to household mobility, and also with reference to the necessity for reconciling short-term and long-term housing needs in any housing programme.     

Household type and the demographic transition

Demographic transition theorists postulate a post-transition steady state predicated on the nuclear family. This study reveals that other family types—community and anomic/polygynous—will, if they persist, produce different steady states at higher levels of infant mortality and fertility. Only if family type changes as countries modernize will the transition theorists' post-transition steady state be achieved.     

Household size and the poisson distribution

Household size distributions for 104 countries are examined. It is shown that a Poisson distribution truncated at zero can be used to derive models of household size distribution. An improved fit is obtained by adding a linear term to the truncated Poisson model. This distribution depends only on average household size which in turn is shown to be related to modified dependency ratios. This method can be used for comparisons of household size distributions across nations and for long-term forecasting.     

Temporary Employment Contracts and Household Income

Social Indicators Research - It is widely accepted that temporary jobs tend to be associated with low pay which, in turn, will have negative consequences for household income. Evidence in support...     

Household composition and optimal commodity taxes

This paper investigates conditions under which demographic variables will have no impact on commodity taxes. We allow nonlinear and nonseparable preferences, a general demographic demand procedure, and a demogrant scheme linked to the number of children. Formulae for demographic revision of tax estimates are presented in a form that can be easily applied, and the only marginal data requirement is the number of children in the household. The paper extends an earlier exercise (Ray 1988) in avoiding the need for equivalence scales, and in using a demogrant scheme that is consistent with current practice in several European countries. The study confirms the robustness of the earlier discussion to the demogrant scheme adopted.I acknowledge, with thanks, the comments of two anonymous referees, but retain responsibility for errors that may remain.