Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2019 Jan 9;14(1):e0208937. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0208937. eCollection 2019.
Nigeria is one of the fastest growing African economies, yet struggles with armed conflict, poverty, and morbidity. An area of high concern is how this situation affects vulnerable families and their children. A key pathway in improving the situation for children in times of conflict is to reinforce maternal agency, for instance, through education. However, the state of the art of research lacks a clear understanding of how many years of education is needed before children benefit. Due to mother's differing social context and ability, the effect of maternal education varies. We study the heterogeneous treatment effects of maternal agency, here operationalized as length of education, on severe child undernutrition in the context of armed conflict. We deploy a repeated cross-sectional study design, using the Nigeria 2008 and 2013 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). The sample covers 25,917 children and their respective mothers. A key methodological challenge is to estimate this heterogeneity inductively. The causal inference literature proposes a machine learning approach, Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART), as a promising avenue to overcome this challenge. Based on BART-estimation of the Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) this study confirms earlier findings in that maternal education decreases severe child undernutrition, but only when mothers acquire an education that lasts more than the country's compulsory 9 years; that is 10 years of education and higher. This protective effect remains even during the exposure of armed conflict.
尼日利亚是非洲增长最快的经济体之一，但仍面临武装冲突、贫困和疾病等问题。一个令人高度关注的领域是这种情况如何影响弱势家庭及其儿童。改善冲突时期儿童处境的一个关键途径是增强母亲的能动性，例如通过教育。然而，现有研究的现状缺乏对儿童受益前需要多少年教育的清晰理解。由于母亲所处的社会环境和能力不同，母亲教育的效果也有所不同。我们研究了在武装冲突背景下，母亲能动性（这里表现为受教育年限）对严重儿童营养不良的异质处理效应。我们采用重复横截面研究设计，使用了 2008 年和 2013 年尼日利亚人口与健康调查（DHS）的数据。样本涵盖了 25917 名儿童及其各自的母亲。一个关键的方法学挑战是归纳性地估计这种异质性。因果推理文献提出了一种机器学习方法，即贝叶斯加性回归树（BART），作为克服这一挑战的有前途的途径。基于 BART 对条件平均处理效应（CATE）的估计，本研究证实了早期的发现，即母亲的教育水平降低了严重的儿童营养不良，但只有当母亲接受的教育持续时间超过该国强制性的 9 年，即 10 年及以上的教育时，才会出现这种情况。即使在武装冲突的暴露期间，这种保护作用仍然存在。
