Measuring Social Connection and Children's Well-Being using Multiple Data Sources

描述(由申请人提供)：这项研究将通过协调分析密集的人种学数据和关于南非农村地区同一人口的纵向人口数据来改进社会联系的衡量标准。在不同背景下进行的大量研究表明，社会关系是幸福的一个重要决定因素，衡量的标准是教育、营养状况、就业前景、获得医疗保健的机会以及对年老体弱的人的支持。在人口和公共卫生研究中，最常见的社会联系衡量标准是共同居住，这有严重的局限性。未能全面关注各种社会关系，限制了我们理解健康和幸福的社会背景的能力。为了纠正这一失误，我们将利用南非农村现有的人种学数据和纵向人口数据来开发可用于社会调查的新的社会联系衡量标准。人种学数据来自我们在2002年至2004年期间对儿童福利和社会联系项目中的儿童支持网络进行的深入实地调查。这一量化数据是由阿金库尔健康和人口监测系统(AHDSS)对7万名分区人口进行的14轮人口普查的结果。该项目有三个具体和协调的目标。首先，我们通过使用CWSC的所有可用数据来确定有意义和有效的社会联系指标。要做到这一点，需要确定直接影响儿童福祉的资源转移和行为实例，分析这些实例以确定相关社会关系、个人、家庭和社区特征以及所涉行为者和资源的空间分布，并对编码实例进行分类，通过选择最频繁和最重要的模式来减少清单。其次，我们通过将新的数据文件链接到AHDSS数据库、在现有文件之间添加链接以及派生新的变量来处理AHDSS中的数据，从而确定目标1中确定的哪些社会关系指标可以衡量，哪些不可以衡量。第三，我们评估了目标2中AHDSS数据库增加的新的社会关系指标的价值，方法是比较在预测教育和死亡率等儿童幸福指标时包含和不包含这些变量的模型的解释能力。这项研究将增加AHDSS的效用，并可能增加其他人口普查和调查在解释儿童幸福结果方面的效用。通过整合人种学、空间和纵向人口数据，它将有助于发展研究人口和公共卫生的跨学科方法。与公共卫生相关：资金、食物、保护、机会、关怀和情感支持等资源直接在人与人之间流动，对贫穷国家儿童的福祉至关重要，因为这些国家没有强大的市场或政府机构。要理解为什么有些人能茁壮成长，而另一些人却不能，并有效地指导政策干预，我们必须了解围绕和支持他们的社会关系网。该项目将通过整合关于南非贫困农村地区相同人口的人种学数据和纵向人口数据，改进社会联系的衡量标准。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The research will develop improved measures of social connection through coordinated analyses of intensive ethnographic data and a longitudinal demographic data about the same population in a rural area of South Africa. A great volume of research conducted in various contexts demonstrates that social connection is an important determinant of well-being measured by outcomes such as education, nutritional status, employment prospects, access to health care, and support of the aged and infirm. The most common measure of social connection in population and public health research is co-residence, which has critical limitations. Failure to attend to the full range of social relationships limits our ability to understand the social context of health and well-being. To redress this failure, we will use existing ethnographic data and longitudinal demographic data from rural South Africa to develop new measures of social connection that can be used in social surveys. The ethnographic data is from an intensive fieldwork investigation of children's networks of support in the Children's Well Being and Social Connection project (CWSC) which we conducted between 2002 and 2004. The quantitative data is the result of fourteen rounds of a population-wide census in a sub-district population of 70,000 people conducted by the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance System (AHDSS). The project has three specific and coordinated aims. First, we identify meaningful and efficient indicators of social connection by using all the available data from the CWSC. This is done by identifying instances of resource transfer and behavior that directly impact children's well-being, analyzing these instances to determine the relevant social relationships, individual, household and community characteristics, and spatial distribution of the actors and resources involved, and classifying the coded instances and reduce the list by selecting the most frequent and important patterns. Second, we determine which indicators of social connection identified in Aim 1 can, and which cannot, be measured by manipulating the data from the AHDSS by linking new data files to the AHDSS database, adding links between existing files, and deriving new variables. Third, we assess the value of the new indicators of social connection added to the AHDSS database in Aim 2 by comparing the explanatory power of models that do and do not include these variables in predicting measures of child well-being such as education and mortality. This research will increase the utility of the AHDSS, and potentially, of other censuses and surveys, in explaining child well-being outcomes. By integrating ethnographic, spatial, and longitudinal population data it will contribute to the development of interdisciplinary methods for studying population and public health. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Resources, such as money, food, protection, opportunities, care, and emotional support that flow directly from person to person are vital for the well-being of children in poor countries that do not have strong market or government institutions. To understand why some people thrive and others do not, and to direct policy interventions effectively, we must understand the web of social connections that surrounds and supports them. This project will produce improved measures of social connection by integrating ethnographic data and longitudinal demographic data about the same population in a poor, rural area of South Africa.