CPRC student fellow, Ashley Fox, has received a CPRC Student Travel Fund Award to present her paper, “Economic Inequality as an Underlying Cause of HIV in Africa? The HIV-Poverty Thesis Re-Examined,” at the 2009 annual meeting of the Population Association of America.
Background: Contrary to theories of poverty as the underlying cause of HIV in Africa, an increasing body of evidence at the national and individual levels indicates that wealthier countries and individuals within countries are at heightened risk for HIV. This study tests the hypothesis that HIV infection increases under conditions of socio-economic inequality rather than poverty. Methods: Examining demographic and health survey data from sixteen African countries, this study utilizes a multi-level model to assess the relationship between HIV infection and economic inequality. All multivariate models were run as a two-level, hierarchical random intercept and slope models in Stata adjusted for clustering at the regional level. Results: Results from the two-level random intercept model demonstrated that individual wealth quintile and regional gini coefficient are positive and significant. As hypothesized, wealthier individuals are at higher risk for HIV infection and the probability of infection increases with rising regional (within-country) inequality.
Ofira Schwartz-Soicher has also received a CPRC Student Travel Fund Award to present her paper, “Beyond Absenteeism: Father Incarceration and its Effects on Children's Development,” at the 2009 annual meeting of the Population Association of America.
Abstract: High rates of incarceration among American men, coupled with high rates of fatherhood among men in prison, have motivated recent research on the effects of parental imprisonment on child development. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the effects of incarceration on approximately 3,000 urban children around the time of their fifth birthdays. We estimate a series of cross-sectional and longitudinal regression models for several measures of child development and school readiness, controlling not only for fathers’ basic demographic characteristics and a rich set of potential confounders, (e.g, mothers’ demographic background, and details of pre-incarceration family structure and parental behaviors), but also for several measures of pre-incarceration child development, and, for family fixed effects. We find that incarceration significantly aggravates children’s externalizing behavior problems, but not physical health, social problems, or verbal ability. Results are mixed with respect to attention problems, and while the majority of models suggest no effects on internalizing behavior problems, one suggests that father incarceration may protect against children’s anxious/depressed behavior.
While incarceration is just one of many factors that can contribute to father absence and negatively affect child development, the observed effects of incarceration on children’s behavior problems are significantly more damaging for children than the effects of other forms of father absence. These findings suggest that children with incarcerated fathers are a population at particular risk, and require specialized support from caretakers, teachers, and social service providers. We recommend directions for future research to determine the most effective forms this support might take.