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Aine Seitz McCarthy
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Who chooses how many children to have?

11/21/2011

3 Comments

 
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Nava Ashraf, Erica Field and Jean Lee performed an experimental study in urban Zambia to evaluate the impact of a community health worker intervention on changes in family planning. This has been done before. The seminal Matlab Project in Bangladesh in the 1970s showed that poor populations could reduce fertility and improve child health given adequate options through a community health worker intervention. This spawned a wave of family planning community health interventions in the developing world.

Notably, though, Ashraf, Field and Lee divided their treatment group into a 'couples' treatment and an 'individuals' treatment. This way, the community health worker visits would involve either consultations with the couple together, or consultations with the women alone. The 'individual' treatment gave women the opportunity to choose whether or not to consult their husbands about opting in or out of very cheap family planning options. And because of this:

Women treated alone were 23% more likely to seek family planning services and 28% more likely to use concealable forms of contraception, leading to a 57% reduction in unwanted births.

And the role of asymmetric information here answers the question about who wants more children, according to one woman who was interviewed:

I put [the voucher for free contraceptives] in the bag for my children's clothes to hide it from my husband. I did not show him the voucher because he does not know that I am using contraceptives.

Because, according to the enumerator:

It seems the husband wants the wife to get pregnant that is why he's not allowing the wife to use contraceptives.

From anecdotal conversations and observations, it almost seems obvious that men want more children than women.  I have no idea if this is always true but the authors note that this difference in desired family size might be reduced if we found a way to help men to internalize the costs to women of childbearing and child-raising. Sounds ambitious.

3 Comments
Melissa
11/21/2011 11:36:40 pm

Seems like plenty of American men who don't want children have internalized what the costs would be to themselves. Maybe that's the better route to take.

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7/31/2012 12:26:00 pm

We were very interested to see your comments about using PDAs for data collection. Young Lives has carried out 3 rounds of a longitudinal household and child survey using pen and paper. We started to use PDAs in Round 3 in some of our sites, and are planning to use them in all 4 of our study countries in the next survey round. We are working in some very remote sites so there were many factors to consider, which we set out in our Methods Guide. Our Peru team also reviewed the potential bias that might be introduced by using PDAs. They found no significant differences between the results obtained from PDA-based questionnaires and paper-based questionnaires. But they also concluded that training for fieldworkers is important to ensure that their interaction and rapport with survey respondents does not suffer due to them focusing on the technology rather than the person they are interviewing.

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    Aine Seitz McCarthy

    International development, economics and some pretty ambitious ideas from a stubborn graduate student clinging to her sense of adventure.


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