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Title: Pathways to Increasing Child Health: Implications for Policy, Research, and Practice
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Langton, Callie |
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Pathways to Increasing Child Health: Implications for Policy, Research, and Practice Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Child Health; Cohabitation; Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC); Families, Two-Parent; Family Characteristics; Household Structure; Insurance, Health; Marriage; Parental Investments Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. How to promote child health has been the focus of much debate among scholars, policy makers, and practitioners. Yet, research on reliably measuring subjective aspects of child health over time as well as on how family structure and income support policies may influence child health is limited. This dissertation is comprised of three papers that focus on these topics. The first paper examines how socioeconomic and psychosocial factors affect agreement between parental proxy reports and children's self-reports of children's health related quality of life. Results show that parental mental health status, education, work, and health literacy are associated with the consistency of these reports, suggesting that parent and child reports are not interchangeable and that their level of agreement may be influenced by a host of family characteristics. The second paper investigates differences in health insurance coverage for children whose parents cohabit and those whose parents are married, with a focus on families that include a social (non-biological) parent. Child health insurance coverage may vary as a function of differences in access to economic resources and differences in access to employer sponsored health insurance policies between family structures. Results from this paper suggest children in cohabiting and social-father families are more likely to have public and less likely to have private coverage than those in (married) two-biological parent families. The final paper uses an instrumental variables strategy to examine associations of an exogenous change in income due to expansions in the Earned income Tax Credit with family health behaviors, child health outcomes, and children's health insurance coverage. Results suggest that children in families that experience an exogenous increase in income are more likely to be covered by (private) health insurance, to have gone to the dentist in the previous year, and to be reported by their mother as being in excellent health. This dissertation has implications for better understanding factors that place children at risk for health problems as well as for identify pathways by which social policy programs and the healthcare system can promote optimal quality of life for low-income children and families. |
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Bibliography Citation
Langton, Callie. Pathways to Increasing Child Health: Implications for Policy, Research, and Practice. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011. |