Browsing by Subject "Child"
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Item Child nutritional well-being in Ghana: an analysis of associated individual, household, and contextual health indicators and socioeconomic and biophysical environmental variables.(2011-08) Nikoi, Ebenezer Goodman AshieDepriving children of the nutrients needed for growth sets them up to fail in life. When children are well nourished and cared for, they are more likely to survive, thrive, and to meaningfully contribute to society. This study assesses the association of characteristics of individual children under age five in Ghana, their mothers, and their households—as well as socioeconomic and environmental characteristics of the places where they live—with differential nutritional well-being. What distinguishes this study from most research on young children’s nutritional status in the Global South is its analysis of data for individual children, made possible by use of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), and assignation of district variables that capture characteristics of their places of residence to individual children as cases. This enables assessment of the relative explanatory role of variables that describe the socioeconomic and biophysical environments. This study implements a three-level multivariate logistic regression analysis with separate models for each of the nutritional outcome variables—height-for-age, weightfor- age and hemoglobin—at each level. Descriptive statistics summarize the prevalence of stunting, underweight, and hemoglobin and delineate frequencies and proportions for selected independent variables at each level. Further statistical analysis relies on chisquared (χ2) tests to determine significant bivariate associations. All significantly associated variables in the bivariate analysis are subjected to binary logistic regression analysis. The results of fixed effects are reported with odds ratios (ORs) along with confidence intervals for p<.05. The following variables were found to be significantly associated with at least one of the three nutritional outcomes in multivariate analyses at the child and district levels: child’s age, months of breastfeeding, fever, mother’s health status, prenatal care, mother’s occupation, mother’s ethnicity, household water supply, household wealth status, population density, percent literate (vs. illiterate) in district, percent in rural (vs. urban) locations, wealth status of district residents, and ecological zone of residence. As found in much previous research, mother’s education and occupation, father’s education and occupation, household size and structure, and sanitation were significantly associated with children’s nutritional status in bivariate analysis but not in multivariate analysis. After controlling for the characteristics of children, mothers and households, significant associastions with children’s nutritional status were found for population density, percentage of literate (vs. illiterate) residents in a district, wealth status of district residents, and residence in the Guinea Forest-Savanna Mosaic and Central African Mangrove ecological zones. Other significantly associated variables in the final models were the age of the child, months of breastfeeding, whether the child’s mother has health insurance and the wealth status of a child’s household. Notwithstanding the shortcomings of this study, its findings can potentially assist stakeholders by providing a better understanding of the diverse set of factors that influence children’s nutritional status and some explanation for differences in nutritional status among places within Ghana.Item The cognitive effects of bilingualism: does knowing two languages impact children’s ability to reason about mental states?(2010-04) Millett, Katherine Ruth GordonIn a number of studies, bilingual children have been shown to outperform monolingual children in false belief tasks, thus providing evidence that bilingualism affects children's ability to reason about the mental states of others. However, there are two limitations to this past work. The first limitation is that false belief tasks only measure a limited aspect of children's mental state reasoning abilities. Thus, performance in false belief tasks cannot be assumed to reflect a general ability to reason about the mental states of others. Secondly, the language skills of the bilingual groups included in this past work were only reliably measured in one language. Thus, we do not have a good understanding of how language proficiency across both languages impacts mental state reasoning abilities. In order to address these limitations, 3- to 5-year-old Spanish-English bilingual children and English monolingual children were tested using Wellman and Liu's (2004) scale which assesses a variety of aspects of mental state reasoning. The scale includes the following tasks: a Diverse Desires task, a Diverse Beliefs task, a Knowledge Access task, a Contents False Belief task, an Explicit False Belief task, a Belief-Emotion task, and a Real-Apparent Emotion task. Additionally, the language proficiency of the bilingual group was measured in both English and Spanish using standardized measures of vocabulary comprehension (the PPVT and the TVIP). Results indicate that when English vocabulary level was controlled, the bilingual children outperformed the monolingual children in the Diverse Desires task. Furthermore, effect sizes suggest that the bilingual children also outperformed the monolingual children in the Knowledge Access, Belief-Emotion, and Real-Apparent Emotion tasks when English vocabulary level was controlled. Overall, these findings provide evidence that bilingualism contributes to a broader effect on mental state reasoning than has been previously found.Item Comparing cutaneous sensory reactivity between children with and without global developmental delay(2014-05) Barney, Chantel C.Our scientific understanding of pain among individuals with developmental delays and disabilities with associated intellectual, motor, and/or communicative impairments is limited because of the difficulty in reliably and validly assessing a complex experience when verbal self-report is compromised. One approach is to rely on non-verbal pain behaviors. There has been no work comparing non-verbal pain behavior of very young children with global developmental delays with age and gender matched typically developing children. This study used a calibrated tactile sensory test to provide a mechanisms-based approach to indirectly compare the functionality of the somatosensory pathways in children with and without global developmental delay (GDD). A case control design was used to test the reactivity of 20 children with GDD (60% male; M age = 4.91 years, SD=1.13) and 20 typically developing children (60% male; M age = 3.49 years, SD=1.08). Sensory reactivity was indexed by vocal, facial, and body activity during the sensory test. This sample of children with GDD exhibited significantly greater duration of overall reactivity during the sensory test (p<.01) and specifically exhibited greater vocal (p<.01) and body (p<.05) reactivity compared to controls. For children with GDD, severity of self-injurious behavior significantly correlated with vocal (r=.58, p=.01) and body (r=.56, p<.05) reactivity during the pin prick trial. Children with GDD who were more reactive to the sensory test had significantly reduced epidermal nerve fiber densities (p<.05). This study was the first to measure the behavioral response of children with GDD to a calibrated sensory test and in comparison to a typically developing control group. The results of the study provide information about the physiology and nociceptive pathways of children with GDD. Despite limitations in verbal self-report, children with GDD exhibited non-verbal pain behaviors to signal their reactivity to a calibrated sensory test.Item Mothers' experience of parenting with a former spouse(2008-12) Laird, L. MargotContinuing to share parenting with a former spouse following divorce, commonly referred to as coparenting, is rapidly becoming a favored custody choice of many families, professionals, and family court systems, affecting the lives of millions of individuals each year. In spite of its rapidly growing popularity, there is still much we do not understand about the nature of the coparenting relationship at the heart of this new parenting arrangement. What we do know is that developing a coparenting relationship that is healthy for all family members is difficult has a profound influence on the well-being of mothers, fathers, and children of divorce, but especially on the well-being of children. Among the many ways a child may be impacted negatively by divorce, research has shown that a negative and conflicted coparent relationship stands alone in its power to do harm to children. It is considered to be the root cause of many adjustment difficulties, producing predictable, direct, and far-reaching consequences throughout the remainder of children's lives. By contrast, a cooperative and supportive relationship between former spouses can minimize divorce's potential harm to children. Using Giorgi's descriptive phenomenological approach, this study seeks to ground our knowledge about parenting with a former spouse in a deep understanding of the experiential meaning of this phenomenon for mothers in their everyday lived worlds. The study explores the experiences of nine mothers who are coparenting with their former spouses. In-depth interviews were designed to draw out pre-reflective descriptions of their everyday experiences with regard to this phenomenon. Analysis of the mothers' naïve descriptions incorporated Giorgi's phenomenological principles, his procedural guidelines, and an incorporated phenomenological research process of my own that evolved during the analysis. The analysis revealed an everyday world characterized by inescapable and relentless threats to mothers' emotional and psychological equilibrium stemming directly from their experiences as coparents. In addition to revealing this unity of experience, the analysis also uncovered individual constituents of meaning and explored each of them at length. The meanings discovered in this study can benefit parents, professionals, and indeed all who are interested in the well-being of children and parents.