[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/111171.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Women's decision making and child health: Familal and social hierachies

Author

Listed:
  • Desai, Sonalde
  • Kiersten, Johnson
Abstract
Ever since the advent of Women in Development literature in the 1970s, many researchers have argued that women’s empowerment is closely linked to positive outcomes for families and societies (Presser and Sen, 2000). Nowhere has this argument been more important than in the literature on child health (Mason, 1986). While intuitively plausible, the empirical work on this topic has been limited. Two major factors account for this paucity in the literature: 1) conceptually, as we begin to use an increasingly ophisticated and nuanced conceptualization of empowerment, the way in which different dimensions of empowerment relate to each other has become increasingly problematic; and 2) data for empirical research on this topic have been limited at best. In an attempt to address some of these deficiencies, this paper draws from two parallel developments. First, the theoretical literature has grown increasingly sophisticated in its understanding of women’s empowerment—particularly distinguishing between the roles of families and communities. Second, in the past ten years, comparable cross-national studies in a large number of developing countries have been performed. These studies, known as Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), contain large samples and make it possible to carry out an empirical examination of some of these arguments. Drawing on these two developments, this paper examines the impact of women’s ability to make independent decisions on children’s health outcomes—particularly vaccination status, nutritional status, and child mortality in 12 developing countries

Suggested Citation

  • Desai, Sonalde & Kiersten, Johnson, 2005. "Women's decision making and child health: Familal and social hierachies," MPRA Paper 111171, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:111171
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/111171/1/MPRA_paper_111171.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hoy,Christopher Alexander & Rajee Kanagavel & Cameron,Corey Morales, 2022. "Intra-Household Dynamics and Attitudes toward Vaccines : Experimental and Survey Evidencefrom Zambia," Policy Research Working Paper Series 10136, The World Bank.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Health; Child Health; Women Decision making;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health
    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior
    • I15 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Economic Development

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:111171. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.