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

尽管在改善儿童生存方面取得了重大进展，但撒哈拉以南非洲仍然存在着 对儿童的身体发育和幼儿发展造成的一些最坏的后果。 这在很大程度上是由于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项目成功的基础上开发和测试了亲属关系 支助树，评估亲属向单身母亲提供支助的数量和质量， 在肯尼亚的内罗毕的贫民窟里，建议的混合方法，纵向 研究开发了一种新的工会形式化措施，以检查 亲属关系支持、婚姻正规化和婴儿/儿童发展成果。工会 正规化措施将涵盖在社会和/或法律上承认婚姻的过程。的 这项研究的最终目标是确定家庭支持的模式，为以下人员提供最佳保护： 脆弱的母亲和幼儿。我们的分析将集中在工会的直接影响上 正规化和亲属支持对儿童的结果以及对一套中间 已知与儿童发展相关的结果。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， 关系动态通过衡量工会的力量，我们超越了二元分类， 已婚/未婚，这在增加异质性的背景下意义不大， 工会这项措施将承认婚姻作为一个过程的重要性， 更加重视夫妻关系这项措施也可以作为更好地 理解婚姻和家庭形成之间的联系-例如， 对“婚前”生育的含义和影响有了更细致的理解 关系动态此外，通过纵向数据，我们可以评估工会是否 形式化和/或关系质量是联盟稳定性的预测。了解 工会稳定性的决定因素不仅对于将社会变革映射到工会很重要， 家庭，但也因为工会的稳定是一个重要的决定因素，儿童的健康， 幸福虽然由此产生的指标可能无法推广到其他环境， 识别和捕获联合中的异质性是可复制的。措施与分析 我们提出的建议可以为美国和地球仪的努力做出贡献， 了解并因此处理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.