Is Less More? Number of Siblings and Frequency of Maternal Activities with Preschool Children

ABSTRACT

We use the German Socio-Economic Panel to investigate to what extent the number of siblings has on the frequency of cognitively stimulating activities mothers undertake with their children aged 2 to 3 and 5 to 6. The resource dilution model assumes that this relationship should be negative. We introduce the resource augmentation hypothesis and argue that increasing sibship size can also have a positive effect when efficiency gains, the public good character of maternal activities, reallocation of maternal time, and child care by older siblings are considered. Our results from intraindividual and between family analyses suggest that resource dilution is unavoidable in large families, but that resource-augmenting processes are also at work. The relationship between the number of siblings and activity frequency is not linear and can be reversed from negative to positive in smaller families depending on the presence of younger siblings.     

Hand in hand? UN–business cooperation for health and development

This article explores legitimacy challenges arising from increased cooperation between the United Nations and large business companies in the realm of global public health through an examination of the Global Public–Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap, seeking to prevent the spread of disease in poor communities. In contrast to many health partnerships, it does not employ a “vertical” disease-specific program, neither does it involve pharmaceutical companies. Instead the partnership stresses the marketing skills of soap companies in influencing individuals’ hygiene behavior as an important rationale for public–private partnering. The article argues that market-based governing strategies might increase the output legitimacy of global health governance, but that modes of representation and accountability have not evolved sufficiently to provide for broader input legitimacy. I propose that a human rights-based approach to health provides an alternative model that holds greater promise for legitimate governance, focusing on rights-bearing subjects instead of soap consumers.     

Active participation or just more information?

Given increasing calls for children and young people to participate via the Internet in civic and political activities), this article examines how far, and with what success, such participation is occurring among UK teenagers. Findings from a national survey conducted by the UK Children Go Online project show that young people are using the Internet for a wide range of activities that could be considered 'participation', including communicating, peer-to-peer connection, seeking information, interactivity, webpage/content creation and visiting civic/political websites. The findings are closely examined using path analysis techniques to identify the direct and indirect relations among different factors that may explain how and why some young people participate more than others. The results suggest that interactive and creative uses of the Internet are encouraged by the very experience of using the Internet (gaining in interest, skills, confidence, etc.) but that visiting civic websites depends primarily on demographic factors (with older, middle-class girls being most likely to visit these sites). Finally, cluster analysis is used to identify three groups of young people - interactors, the civic-minded and the disengaged - each of which is distinctive in its social context and approach to the Internet.     

Does the EDI Equivalently Measure Facets of School Readiness for Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal children?

The aim of the current paper was to examine the equivalence of the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a teacher rating measure of school readiness, for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children. The current study used an approach, which analyzes the structure and properties of the EDI at the subdomain level. Similar subdomain score distributions would suggest that the EDI measures subdomains similarly for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups, whereas systematic variations in distributions would suggest the presence of bias at the subdomain level. The EDI was completed on a population of kindergarteners in 2003 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Results indicate that mean scores for all the domains and subdomains were significantly lower for Aboriginal children. However, the distributions of subdomains in which children were rated as ‘challenges exist’ were similar among both groups. The findings suggest an equivalent structure of the EDI at the subdomains level for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children. The next step is to examine the specific correlates, beyond the structure of the EDI, that are associated with disparities in EDI subdomain scores, such as contextual factors and social conditions.     

Validity and Psychometric Properties of the Early Development Instrument in Canada,Australia, United States,and Jamaica

There is an increasing support from international organizations and the research community for stepping beyond infant or child mortality as the most common child level social indicator and progressing towards an international measure of child development. The Early Development Instrument (EDI) is a teacher-completed measure of children’s developmental health at school entry, which to date has been used in more than a dozen countries. The EDI includes five developmental domains (Physical Health and Well-being, Social Competence, Emotional Maturity, Language and Cognitive Development and Communication Skills and General Knowledge) and 16 subdomains. This paper examines the EDI’s psychometric properties in four English-speaking countries (Canada, Australia, United States and Jamaica) by evaluating both the internal consistency and factor structures, as well as exploring the association between the EDI’s Language and Cognitive Development Domain and a direct assessment of children’s receptive vocabulary (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, PPVT). Overall, the factor loadings and internal consistencies of domains and subdomains were similar across the countries. The comparisons of the Language and Cognitive Development Domain with the PPVT showed high specificity and low sensitivity. The results of this paper indicate that the EDI, a measure of children’s developmental status at school entry, demonstrates similar psychometric properties in a number of countries, thus building the evidence for the instrument to be added to the limited array of internationally comparable child social indicators.