Administrative Supplement - Kinship, Nuptiality and Child Health Outcomes in a Low Income Urban Area

尽管在改善儿童存活率方面取得了重大进展，但撒哈拉以南非洲地区继续 一些对儿童身体发育和儿童早期发展最糟糕的结果。 这在很大程度上是因为生活在低收入城市社区的儿童面临的风险增加。 在这个项目中，我们在NICHD R21项目的成功基础上开发和测试Kinship 支持树(KST)评估亲属对单身母亲的支持数量和质量 他们的孩子在肯尼亚内罗毕的贫民窟中。建议的混合方法，纵向 研究开发了一种新的联合形式化方法来检查它们之间的关系 亲属关系支助、结合正规化和婴幼儿发展成果。工会 正规化措施将捕捉到在社会和/或法律上承认工会的过程。这个 这项研究的最终目标是确定提供最佳保护的家庭支持模式 脆弱的母亲和年幼的儿童。我们的分析将集中在联合的直接影响上 关于子女结果的正规化和亲属关系支持以及一套中间 已知的与儿童发展有关的结果。在社会变革的背景下 在婚姻和家庭方面，重要的是制定措施，以提供对 关系动态。通过衡量联合力量，我们超越了 结婚/未婚，这在 工会。这一措施将既承认婚姻作为一个过程的重要性，也承认 更多地强调婚姻纽带。这一措施也可以作为更好地 了解工会和家庭形成之间的联系--例如，这将有助于 对婚前生育的含义和影响的更细微的理解 关系动态。此外，通过纵向数据，我们可以评估联合 形式化和/或关系质量是工会稳定性的预测因素。了解 工会稳定的决定因素不仅对于将社会变革与工会和 家庭，但也是因为工会的稳定是儿童健康和 幸福。虽然所产生的指标可能不能推广到其他情况，但这一进程 识别和捕捉联合中的异质性的方法是可复制的。测算与分析 我们建议可以为美国和全球的努力做出贡献，以更好地 理解并解决社会模式对家庭变化的影响。

Despite significant progress in improving child survival, sub-Saharan Africa continues to have some of the worst outcomes for children’s physical growth and early childhood development. This is driven in large part by elevated risks for children living in low-income urban communities. In this project, we build on the success of an NICHD R21 project to develop and test the Kinship Support Tree (KST) to assess quantity and quality of support from kin to single mothers and their children in a slum context in Nairobi, Kenya. The proposed mixed methods, longitudinal study develops a new measure of union formalization to examine the relationships among kinship support, union formalization and infant/child development outcomes. The union formalization measure will capture the process of recognizing unions socially and/or legally. The ultimate goal of the study is to identify models of family support that offer optimum protection for vulnerable mothers and young children. Our analysis will focus on the direct effects of union formalization and kinship support on child outcomes as well as on a set of intermediate outcomes known to be associated with child development. Within the context of social change to marriage and family, it is important to develop measures that can offer salient understanding of relationship dynamics. By measuring union strength, we move past the binary categorization of married/unmarried, which is less meaningful within the context of increased heterogeneity in unions. This measure will both recognize the importance of marriage as a process and the increased emphasis on the conjugal bond. This measure could also serve as the basis for better understanding the linkages between union and family formation - for example, it would facilitate a far more nuanced understanding of the meaning and impact of “premarital” childbearing on relationship dynamics. Further, with longitudinal data, we can assess whether union formalization and/or relationship quality are predictive of union stability. Understanding the determinants of union stability is not only important for mapping social change to unions and families, but also because union stability is an important determinant of children’s health and wellbeing. While the resulting indicators might not be generalizable to other settings, the process of identifying and capturing heterogeneity in unions is replicable. The measures and analyses we propose can contribute to efforts in the United States, and across the globe, to better understand, and therefore address, the impacts of social patterns in family change.