Improved Measures of the Family Environment in Longitudinal Population Studies of Child Health in Sub-Saharan Africa

儿童健康是一个全球卫生优先事项，发展中国家每年有600多万可预防的儿童死亡，2亿多儿童未能充分发挥其发展潜力。在撒哈拉以南非洲，将儿童死亡率降低三分之二的千年发展目标远未实现。家庭对儿童的健康和发展至关重要。越来越多的证据表明，干预措施和政策可以成功地支持家庭促进儿童的健康和福祉。这些干预措施的设计和评价需要关于家庭和儿童健康的高质量、详细和有效的数据，而撒哈拉以南非洲目前的数据非常有限。我们的研究将确定更好的方法来衡量和描述复杂和动态的家庭关系和过程。有关家庭数据的改进将有助于我们和其他研究人员和服务部门机构努力了解和支持中低收入国家的家庭促进其子女的健康。我们将以南非农村一个完善的人口监测系统为模式，开发和测试新的工具和战略，以收集更好的家庭数据。这项研究涉及南安普顿大学、伦敦卫生和热带医学院以及非洲卫生和人口研究中心的研究人员。

Child health is a global health priority with over 6 million preventable child deaths occurring every year in developing countries and more than 200 million children failing to reach their full developmental potential. The Millennium Development Goal to reduce child mortality by two-thirds is far from being met in sub-Saharan Africa. Families are central to the health and development of children. There is increasing evidence that interventions and policies can successfully support families in promoting better health and wellbeing of children. The design and evaluation of these interventions requires high quality, detailed and validated data on families and child health which is currently very limited in sub-Saharan Africa. Our research will identify better ways to measure and characterize complex and dynamic family relationships and processes. The improvements in data about families will assist us and other researchers and service-sector agencies in our efforts to understand and support families in promoting the health of their children in low and middle-income countries. Using a well-established demographic surveillance system in rural South Africa as a model, we will develop and test new instruments and strategies for collecting improved data about families. The research involves researchers at the University of Southampton, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies.