Tanzanian adolescents' attitudes toward abortion: innovating video vignettes in survey research on health topics.

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study was to pilot an innovative cartoon video vignette survey methodology to learn about young people's perspectives on abortion and sexual relationships in Tanzania. The Animating Children's Views methodology used videos shown on tablets to engage young people in conversations. Such conversations are complicated because abortion is highly stigmatized, inaccessible, and illegal in Tanzania. METHODS: The cartoon video vignette methodology was conducted as a part of a quantitative survey using tablet computers. Hypothetical situations and euphemistic expressions were tested in order to engage adolescents on sensitive topics in low-risk ways. Qualitative interviews and focus groups validated and further explored the perspectives of the young respondents. RESULTS: Results indicate that 12-17 year-olds usually understand euphemistic expressions for abortion and are aware of social stigma and contradictory norms surrounding abortion from as young as age twelve. Despite the risks involved with abortion, this study finds adolescents sometimes view abortion as a reasonable solution to allow a girl to remain in school. Additional findings show that as adolescents wrestle with how to respond to a schoolgirl's pregnancy, they are considering both the (un)affordability of healthcare services and also expectations for gender roles. CONCLUSIONS: Digital data collection, such as the Animating Children's Views cartoon video vignettes used in this study, allows researchers to better understand girls' and boys' own perspectives on their experiences and reproductive health.

The Animating Children's Views project used cartoon video vignettes to collect quantitative and qualitative data on girls' and boys' (infrequently included) perspectives about this sensitive topic as these young people aged into and figured out how to navigate sexual maturity in rural and urban Tanzania. This novel survey technique leveraged digital technology to better engage young people's perspectives about sensitive health topics. Despite the risks involved with abortion, this study finds adolescents sometimes view abortion as a reasonable solution to allow a girl to remain in school. Additional findings show that as adolescents wrestle with how to respond to a schoolgirl's pregnancy, they are considering both the (un)affordability of healthcare services and also expectations for gender roles. We argue that digital data collection allows survey research to include girls and boys, to better understand how reproductive health outcomes are inextricably linked to their future lives.

Is policy well-targeted to remedy financial strain among caregivers of severely injured U.S. service members?

U.S. military service members have sustained severe injuries since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This paper aims to determine the factors associated with financial strain of their caregivers and establish whether recent federal legislation targets caregivers experiencing financial strain. In our national survey, 62.3% of caregivers depleted assets and/or accumulated debt, and 41% of working caregivers left the labor force. If a severely injured veteran needed intensive help, the primary caregiver faced odds 4.63 times higher of leaving the labor force, and used $27,576 more in assets and/or accumulated debt compared to caregivers of veterans needing little or no assistance.

Implications of Environmental Chores for Schooling: Children's Time Fetching Water and Firewood in Tanzania.

In many developing countries, children devote substantial time to collecting firewood and fetching water. Is there a connection between such time-consuming work and children's schooling? If so, environmental degradation may have serious detrimental implications for children's education. To explore this question, this case study set in rural Tanzania uses evidence collected from children and their mothers about children's environmental chores. Although the sample is small, we find some descriptive quantitative evidence as well as qualitative evidence from focus groups with children supporting such a link, consistent with results from the few econometric analyses set in Africa. We also document substantial demands by schools for students to fetch water. The proposed conceptual framework takes into account confounding factors including school-related violence, which affected more than one-third of children in this study. We make a case for future research based on larger data collection projects designed to explore these issues more fully.

Effects of Economic Shocks on Children's Employment and Schooling in Brazil.

This paper uses longitudinal employment survey data to analyze the impact of household economic shocks on the schooling and employment transitions of young people in metropolitan Brazil. The paper uses data on over 100,000 children ages 10-16 from Brazil's Monthly Employment Survey (PME) from 1982 to 1999. Taking advantage of the rotating panels in the PME, we compare households in which the male household head becomes unemployed during a four-month period with households in which the head is continuously employed. Probit regressions indicate that an unemployment shock significantly increases the probability that a child enters the labor force, drops out of school, and fails to advance in school. The effects can be large, implying increases of as much as 50% in the probability of entering employment for 16-year-old girls. In contrast, shocks occurring after the school year do not have significant effects, suggesting that these results are not due to unobserved characteristics of households that experience unemployment shocks. The results suggest that some households are not able to absorb short-run economic shocks, with negative consequences for children.

Impact of Domestic Violence on Children's Education in Colombia: Methodological Challenges.

We explore the methodological challenges of estimating the effects of intimate partner violence (IPV) against the mother on the educational outcomes of her children. We tackle the problem of potential endogeneity and non-random selection of children into situations where they are exposed to IPV using non-parametric matching methods and parametric instrumental variable methods. Using Colombia's 2005 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), we find that IV and non-IV estimators produce qualitatively similar results at varying degrees of precision, for some educational outcomes. Therefore, exogeneity of IPV to various education outcomes cannot be taken for granted; appropriate methods need to be used to study its causal effects.

Capacity and limits of associative memory in pigeons.

How much information can a brain store over a lifetime's experience? The answer to this important, but little researched, question was investigated by looking at the long-term visual memory capacity of 2 pigeons. Over 700 sessions, the pigeons were tested with an increasingly larger pool of pictorial stimuli in a two-alternative discrimination task (incremented in sets of 20 or 30 pictures). Each picture was randomly assigned to either a right or a left choice response, forcing the pigeons to memorize each picture and its associated response. At the end of testing, 1 pigeon was performing at 73% accuracy with a memory set of over 1,800 pictures, and the 2nd was at 76% accuracy with a memory set of over 1,600 pictures. Adjusted for guessing, models of the birds' performance suggested that the birds had access, on average, to approximately 830 memorized picture-response associations and that these were retained for months at a time. Reaction time analyses suggested that access to these memories was parallel in nature. Over the last 6 months of testing, this capacity estimate was stable for both birds, despite their learning increasingly more items, suggesting some limit on the number of picture-response associations that could be discriminated and retained in the long-term memory portion of this task. This represents the first empirically established limit on long-term memory use for any vertebrate species. The existence of this large exemplar-specific memory capacity has important implications for the evolution of stimulus control and for current theories of avian and human cognition.

Challenges in determining how child work affects child health.

Credible findings from well-crafted research studies are essential in assessing the impact of child work on children's health. Researchers, however, encounter significant challenges in defining the relevant group of workers for a study and identifying an appropriate comparison group. This article describes some of those challenges and explains how choices about study and comparison groups can lead to biased research results. When selecting study groups, researchers should be aware that the impact of work on health may depend on the type and intensity of the work, and on the context in which it occurs. They should avoid drawing conclusions about the health effects of particular work situations from studies of very heterogeneous groups of workers and should not overgeneralize from studies of more homogenous groups. When choosing comparison groups, researchers should select children whose health outcomes are likely to be comparable to the outcomes working children would experience if they did not work. In particular, researchers should attempt to find children who are similar to the workers of interest on relevant non-work characteristics, including socioeconomic status and levels of parental education. In addition, they should consider the extent to which healthier children are more likely to select into the labor force as a result of decisions by parents or employers, or due to their own greater fitness. Ideally, studies of the health effects of child work should use multiple comparison groups, including children who work in relatively safe, non-strenuous occupations.

Counting Child Domestic Servants in Latin America.

This paper summarizes trends in the use of child domestic servants in six Latin American countries using IPUMS-International census samples for 1960 to 2000. Child domestics are among the most vulnerable of child workers, and the most invisible. They may be treated kindly and allowed to attend school, or they may be secluded in their employers' home, overworked, verbally abused, beaten, and unable to leave or report their difficulties to kin. Estimates and imputations are based on labor force and relationship-to-head variables. We find that domestic service makes up a substantial fraction of girls' employment in some countries. We also analyze trends in live-in versus live-out status and school enrollment of child domestic servants. While all child workers are disadvantaged in enrollment relative to non-workers, domestics are sometimes better off than non-domestic workers. In some samples, live-ins are more likely to go to school than live-out child domestics. In others, they are substantially worse off.

Intermittent child employment and its implications for estimates of child labour.

Using longitudinal data from urban Brazil, the authors track the employment patterns of thousands of children aged 10-16 during four months of their lives in the 1980s and 1990s. The proportion of children who work at some point during a four-month period is substantially higher than the fraction observed working in any single month. The authors calculate an intermittency multiplier to summarize the difference between employment rates in one reference week vs. four reference weeks over a four-month period. They conclude that intermittent employment is a crucial characteristic of child labour which must be recognized to capture levels of child employment adequately and identify child workers.