Child Health Effects of Rapid Socio-Demographic Change—a Three-country Longitudinal Study
This long-term project is utilizing the China, Russia, and Cebu cohort studies. This is a long-term effort begun in 2000 that will last for 5–10 years. The China, Russia, and Philippines projects focus on how a wide range of neighborhood and macro contextual factors (e.g., prices at the macro level and infrastructure and a wide range of facilities at the neighborhood level) affect health outcomes. A three-country comparative study has a particular focus on rapid urbanization, changes in income and prices, and spread of mass media over the last several decades. These changes reflect numerous international and national macroeconomic and political factors. Longitudinal surveys capture a wide range of exogenous macroeconomic shocks related to major devaluations, removal, and often elimination of subsidies (e.g., the reforms in Russia and China), major shifts in macro-economic and regulatory conditions, which have opened up massive foreign investment and improvements in labor productivity in the Asian countries. Exciting research to date has shown how shifts in Chinese food price subsidies affect dietary fat and protein intake via their effects on selected foods, the rapid change in the structure of the income effects on diet, and the way this decision-making structure is differentially changing for rich and poor Chinese households. Proposed research will look across the three countries at these issues, attempt to understand how a range of changing SES factors affect health behaviors and outcomes, and in particular, to disaggregate what it is about urban residence that affects health.
The study is attempting to understand the key shifts in diet and activity/inactivity, then model how contextual factors and other dimensions of social change affect them, and finally understand how these dynamic changes affect child obesity. There are many dimensions to this work and a large number of faculty (Barry Popkin, Linda Adair, and David Guilkey are the major faculty involved; Barbara Ainsworth from the University of South Carolina is the physical activity consultant; Peggy Bentley and Jane Brown are involved with the body image and mass media component). Smaller substudies include measurement of body composition and body fatness among children, focus group research on social factors affecting rapid dietary change and body image shifts, inter alia.
A number of NIH grants support this work. They come from the NICHD and also the Fogarty International Center. Added support for the physical activity work came from Mars Incorporated and the Mellon Foundation.
