This research will examine the roles of community and family in determining infant and child health outcomes and maternal health behaviors in Indonesia over a 16 year period of major demographic and economic change. The outcomes of interest are birthweight, size at birth, prematurity, mortality risks of infants and children, and children's nutritional status, use of prenatal care, and choice of delivery site. Examples of the questions the research will address are: Do children of poorly-educated women with low education fare better when they are born into communities where average educational attainments are high? How does access to public and to private health facilities affect child health outcomes and maternal health behaviors during pregnancy? Do the effects of access vary by maternal education or household income? What role does household income play in explaining use of prenatal care, choice of delivery site, infant and child mortality, and children's nutritional status? How do controls for family-specific risk affect estimates of the impact of birth intervals on infant health outcomes? The research will draw on a particularly rich combination of four household surveys, a detailed community-facility survey, and five censuses of village infrastructure. Together these data provide information on over 70,000 women and their children, as well as on changes over time in the communities in which these women live. The breadth of data permit analysis of a far wider range of community and family characteristics than is possible with typical cross-sectional household surveys. Sample sizes and the availability of community-level data over time support statistical techniques that address a growing concern in the literature regarding biases arising from unobserved heterogeneity at the community and family levels. The resulting analyses will improve understanding of how community and family characteristics affect child well-being and of the sensitivity of estimations to different modeling techniques.
| Frankenberg, E; Thomas, D (2001) Women's health and pregnancy outcomes: do services make a difference? Demography 38:253-65 |
| Beegle, K; Frankenberg, E; Thomas, D (2001) Bargaining power within couples and use of prenatal and delivery care in Indonesia. Stud Fam Plann 32:130-46 |
