Pesando Luca Maria
Department of Sociology and Centre on Population Dynamics (CPD), McGill University.
Popul Res Policy Rev. 2022 Feb;41:251-284. doi: 10.1007/s11113-020-09627-2. Epub 2021 Jan 2.
This study explores the relationship between parental educational similarity - educational concordance () or discordance () - and children's health outcomes. Its contribution is threefold. First and foremost, I use longitudinal data on children's health outcomes tracking children from age 1 to 15, thus being able to assess whether the relationship changes at key life-course and developmental stages of children. This is an important addition to the relevant literature, where the focus is solely on outcomes at birth. Second, I look at different health outcomes, namely height-for-age (HFA) and BMI-for-age (BFA) -scores, alongside their dichotomized counterparts, stunting and thinness. Third, I conduct the same set of analyses in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam, thus providing multi-context evidence from countries at different levels of development and with different socio-economic characteristics and gender dynamics. Results reveal important heterogeneity across contexts. In Ethiopia and India, parental educational homogamy is associated with worse health outcomes in infancy and childhood, while associations are positive in Peru and, foremost, Vietnam. Complementary estimates from matching techniques show that these associations tend to fade after age 1, except in Vietnam, where the positive relationship persists through adolescence, thus supporting the not only at birth, but also across the early life course. Insights from this study contribute to the inequality debate on the intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage and shed additional light on the relationship between early-life conditions and later-life outcomes in critical periods of children's lives.
本研究探讨了父母教育相似度（教育一致性（）或不一致性（））与儿童健康结果之间的关系。其贡献有三个方面。首先也是最重要的，我使用了关于儿童健康结果的纵向数据，对1至15岁的儿童进行跟踪，从而能够评估这种关系在儿童关键的生命历程和发育阶段是否会发生变化。这是对相关文献的一个重要补充，因为相关文献仅关注出生时的结果。其次，我考察了不同的健康结果，即年龄别身高（HFA）和年龄别体重指数（BFA）得分，以及它们的二分对应指标，发育迟缓与消瘦。第三，我在埃塞俄比亚、印度、秘鲁和越南进行了同一组分析，从而提供了来自不同发展水平、具有不同社会经济特征和性别动态的国家的多背景证据。结果揭示了不同背景下的重要异质性。在埃塞俄比亚和印度，父母教育同质性与婴儿期和儿童期较差的健康结果相关，而在秘鲁，尤其是在越南，这种关联是正向的。匹配技术的补充估计表明，这些关联在1岁以后往往会减弱，但在越南除外，在那里这种正向关系持续到青春期，从而不仅支持了出生时的情况，而且也支持了儿童生命早期整个过程中的情况。本研究的见解有助于关于优势和劣势代际传递的不平等辩论，并为儿童生命关键时期的早期生活条件与后期生活结果之间的关系提供了更多启示。
