This career development award will focus on the timing and predictors of demographic decisions adolescents make as they move toward adulthood. Decisions made during adolescence, such as the timing of marriage, fertility-related behavior, and work to school transitions are critical to the remainder of the life course. The Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey (CLHNS) began with over 3,000 pregnant women in 1983. Since that time, over 2,000 of the women and over 2,000 children born in 1983-84 have been extensively followed. Funding has been obtained to collect two more rounds of data in 2002 and 2005, when the adolescents are 18 and 21. This award will fund original data collection in the adolescents' cohabiting partners in 2002 and 2005 and add to existing data on decision-making collected from mothers in 1994. With the CLHNS, I will test the hypothesis that household decision-making, conceptualized as measures of autonomy and relative power, is important as adolescents make key demographic decisions. Specifically, I will:
Aim 1 : Design new measures and collect original data on household decision-making autonomy and power in adolescents, their mothers, and their partners and examine the reliability, stability, and validity of these measures, Aim 2: Explore if the timing of marriage, fertility decisions, sexual behavior, and the transition from school to work is determined by specific elements of the adolescents' backgrounds (including autonomy and power) as well as by their mothers' marital, reproductive, schooling and work histories, and Aim 3: Examine the relationship of intimate partner violence and decision- making autonomy and power, and consider the relationship between intimate partner violence and reproductive health outcomes. During the award, I will focus on developing new skills in collecting original data in large-scale surveys, gain expertise in questionnaire validation, scale development, couple analysis, and complex data analysis, and learn from leaders in the field. The institutional environment, including the Hopkins Population Center, as well as experts in both the quantitative and substantive areas of my research interests, will allow me to form interdisciplinary collaborations and develop the skills required to successfully compete for future research funding.
