UNICEF Office of Research - Innocenti, Piazza SS, Annunziata, 12, 50122 Florence, Italy.
UNICEF Office of Research - Innocenti, Piazza SS, Annunziata, 12, 50122 Florence, Italy; Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 206 West Franklin St., Rm. 208, Chapel Hill, NC 27516, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2017 Mar;177:110-117. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.01.023. Epub 2017 Jan 19.
Poverty is a chronic stressor that can lead to poor physical and mental health. This study examines whether two similar government poverty alleviation programs reduced the levels of perceived stress and poverty among poor households in Zambia.
Secondary data from two cluster randomized controlled trials were used to evaluate the impacts of two unconditional cash transfer programs in Zambia. Participants were interviewed at baseline and followed over 36 months. Perceived stress among female caregivers was assessed using the Cohen Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). Poverty indicators assessed included per capita expenditure, household food security, and (nonproductive) asset ownership. Fixed effects and ordinary least squares regressions were run, controlling for age, education, marital status, household demographics, location, and poverty status at baseline.
Cash transfers did not reduce perceived stress but improved economic security (per capita consumption expenditure, food insecurity, and asset ownership). Among these poverty indicators, only food insecurity was associated with perceived stress. Age and education showed no consistent association with stress, whereas death of a household member was associated with higher stress levels.
In this setting, perceived stress was not reduced by a positive income shock but was correlated with food insecurity and household deaths, suggesting that food security is an important stressor in this context. Although the program did reduce food insecurity, the size of the reduction was not enough to generate a statistically significant change in stress levels. The measure used in this study appears not to be correlated with characteristics to which it has been linked in other settings, and thus, further research is needed to examine whether this widely used perceived stress measure appropriately captures the concept of perceived stress in this population.
贫困是一种慢性压力源，可导致身心健康状况不佳。本研究考察了赞比亚的两项类似政府扶贫计划是否降低了贫困家庭的感知压力和贫困水平。
利用两项整群随机对照试验的二级数据，评估赞比亚两项无条件现金转移计划的影响。在基线和随访 36 个月时对女性照顾者进行感知压力评估，使用 Cohen 感知压力量表（PSS）。评估的贫困指标包括人均支出、家庭粮食安全和（非生产性）资产拥有情况。控制年龄、教育程度、婚姻状况、家庭人口统计数据、地点和基线时的贫困状况后，采用固定效应和普通最小二乘法回归。
现金转移并未降低感知压力，但改善了经济安全（人均消费支出、粮食不安全和资产拥有情况）。在这些贫困指标中，只有粮食不安全与感知压力有关。年龄和教育程度与压力无一致关联，而家庭成员死亡与更高的压力水平相关。
在这种情况下，积极的收入冲击并未减轻感知压力，但与粮食不安全和家庭死亡有关，这表明粮食安全是该背景下的一个重要压力源。尽管该计划确实减少了粮食不安全，但减少的幅度不足以导致压力水平的统计显著变化。本研究中使用的衡量标准似乎与其他环境中与之相关的特征没有相关性，因此需要进一步研究，以确定该广泛使用的感知压力衡量标准是否适当地捕捉了该人群的感知压力概念。
