This Program Project will undertake a comprehensive and thematically unified study of family behaviors and decisions that affect important demographic and health outcomes in a variety of demographic, socioeconomic, cultural, and policy settings. The Project's central theme is that decisions leading to demographic change are motivated by the opportunities and constraints faced by individuals and the households and families they comprise and that these households and families play a crucial role in affecting the health, general well-being, and demographic outcomes of their members. The Project will examine how households and families interact with economic markets and public infrastructure; how these interactions affect health and demographic outcomes; how the interactions differ in diverse institutional, technological, and ecological environments; and how the interactions evolve with socioeconomic change. The Program Project consists of 10 component projects, supported by an Administrative Core and a Data Management and Computing Core. One project entails fielding, in Indonesia, a major new retrospective survey of family demographic and economic behavior. Other projects will use this survey, as well as other surveys, to examine family and household behavior in two primary thematic areas: 1) health and nutrition and 2) fertility, migration and intrafamily resource allocation. The countries that will be examined include Malaysia, Indonesia, Jamaica, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Pakistan. In addition to their thematic coherence, the Program Project's studies are further integrated through their coordinated use of large longitudinal micro datasets and a common and consistent research approach to demographic studies. The premise of this approach is that it is important to understand household and family behavior, both in their own rights and as critical mediating influences between public programs and the ultimate effects these programs have on individuals. This approach typically uses a framework of household production that models households and families as making choices in response to perceived benefits and costs but subject to constraints of available resources and information. Insights from economics, demography and medicine are easily incorporated into this framework.
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