Poverty Health and Adolescent Risk Behavior

描述（由申请人提供）：在这份申请中，我们提议延长一笔父母赠款，用于调查一项名为PROGRESA的独特扶贫计划对墨西哥儿童健康和营养的影响。拟议的扩展是为了调查经济发展和减贫对青少年危险行为的影响。具体而言，我们将评估PROGRESA对毒品、酒精和烟草使用以及性行为的影响。由于PROGRESA增加了家庭收入，并为孩子们留在学校提供了经济激励，我们将检验这样一个假设，即改善极端贫困家庭青少年的教育和生活条件，可以减少危险行为。我们假设，改善教育和生活条件将减少青少年酗酒、吸烟和吸毒，并将减少导致意外怀孕和性传播疾病的性行为。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In this application, we propose to extend a parent grant that investigates the effect of a unique poverty alleviation program called PROGRESA on child health and nutrition in Mexico. The proposed extension is to investigate the impact of economic development and poverty reduction on adolescent risk behavior. Specifically, we will evaluate the impact of PROGRESA on drug, alcohol and tobacco use, and on sexual practices. Since PROGRESA increases household income and provides financial incentives for children to stay in school, we will be testing the hypothesis that improving the education and living conditions of adolescents in extremely poor households reduces risky behaviors. We hypothesize that improved education and living conditions will reduce adolescent alcohol, tobacco and drug use, and will reduce sexual practices leading to unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Our analysis will take advantage of a matched case-control longitudinal design. In 2002, the program, previously well established in rural areas, began incorporating beneficiaries in large urban areas. The government engaged faculty from Berkeley and other institutions to prospectively evaluate the impact of the program in these areas. In 2002, UC Berkeley, along with it's partner the Mexican National Institute of public Health (INSP) conducted a baseline survey of 16,000 households in treatment and comparison areas. A follow-up survey funded by the Mexican Government will be implemented by the INSP in 2004. We propose to use funding from this proposal to substantially enhance the adolescent risk behavior module for the 2004 survey, adding questions about sexual risk behavior, administering the questions with audio computer assisted technology (A-CASI), and collecting samples for biological endpoints. The risk module will be administered to close to 10,000 adolescents age 15-22. In this project, we propose to test the hypothesis that a poverty reduction program will reduce the rates of risky behavior in adolescents, by adding an adolescent risk behavior module to the 2003 survey funded by the parent grant. Therefore, this proposal is related to the parent grant through a common survey and taking advantage of the PKOGRESA intervention to study the impact of poverty alleviation on individual health and welfare. Our research will be guided by the theoretical model of behavioral economics.