Dissertation Research: Gender, Child Health, and Urban Poverty in Northeastern Brazil

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This project involves the dissertation research of an anthropology student from the University of Pittsburgh. The research investigates how members of poor, urban households in Brazil produce child health through the differential allocation of food, water, and health care to children. The project will examine how variations in care, especially by gender, can be explained as responses to larger socio-economic constraints. The student will study a community in a newly settled area of Amazonian Brazil where rapid urbanization has created a class of persons with little access to important resources. The hypothesis to be tested is that differential valuation of male and female children skews the flow of resources with results apparent in child health. Using ethnographic techniques of intensive interviews and participant-observation as well as surveys of households and specific measures of nursing, 24-hour activity recalls and income questionnaires, the student will attempt to examine the workings of the `black box` that is intra-household resource allocation. This research is important because it expands our store of expertise about this critically important region of the world as well as provides information about a basic process affecting child health: the dynamics of resource flows within households. Advances in our knowledge of the specific causes of child health that will result from this case study will be valuable to planners and decision makers concerned about children's general health status.