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

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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.