Mate availability,women's marriage prevalence,and husbands' education

"We predict that marriage prevalence and husbands' education for Black women [in the United States] vary directly with mate availability. We also predict that marriage prevalence and husbands' education will be lower for Black women with less than a high school education than for other Black women. We test these predictions using data on marriage and husbands' education for a national sample of individuals and data on aggregate-level marriage prevalence and husbands' education for a sample of large metropolitan areas. The results support our predictions, and they help to explain how low mate availability for Black women helps to create and maintain an underclass that is disproportionately composed of less-educated Black women and their children."     

Effects of employment and education on preterm and full-term infant mortality in Korea

Objectives

The infant mortality rate is a sensitive and commonly used indicator of the socio-economic status of a population. Generally, studies investigating the relationship between infant mortality and socio-economic status have focused on full-term infants in Western populations. This study examined the effects of education level and employment status on full-term and preterm infant mortality in Korea. Data were collected from the National Birth Registration Database and merged with data from the National Death Certification Database.

Study design

Prospective cohort study.

Methods

In total, 1,316,184 singleton births registered in Korea's National Birth Registration Database between January 2004 and December 2006 were included in the study. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was performed.

Results

Paternal and maternal education levels were inversely related to infant mortality in preterm and full-term infants following multivariate adjusted logistic models. Parental employment status was not associated with infant mortality in full-term infants, but was associated with infant mortality in preterm infants, after adjusting for place of birth, gender, marital status, paternal age, maternal age and parity.

Conclusions

Low paternal and maternal education levels were found to be associated with infant mortality in both full-term and preterm infants. Low parental employment status was found to be associated with infant mortality in preterm infants but not in full-term infants. In order to reduce inequalities in infant mortality, public health interventions should focus on providing equal access to education.     

The relationship between wives' social and psychologic status and their husbands' coronary heart disease. A case-control family study from the Western Collaborative Group Study

Analysis of spouse data from the Western Collaborative Group Study indicated that a number of the wives' behavioral characteristics and their social status were associated with the occurrence of coronary heart disease among their husbands. During 1970-1971, a total number of 130 case and control nuclear families were recruited on a voluntary basis to further investigate the familial component of the Type A/B behavior patterns and their behavioral and psycho-social correlates. When stratified by the behavior type of the husband, we found that Type A men married to women with 13 or more years of schooling had an increased odds ratio (OR) of 3.6 for coronary heart disease compared with 0.4 in Type B men with similarly educated wives. The wife's employment status outside the home did not show a significant association with coronary disease in the husband (OR = 1.3). A self-reported measure of perceived accomplishments of the wife showed an association with coronary disease of the husband that was independent of his Type A/B behavior type (OR = 2.7). Further analyses of the psychologic aspects of the marital partners, as assessed by the Thurstone Temperament Schedule, indicated that Type A husbands who had coronary disease were married to wives who were more active and dominant than wives of noncases. On the other hand, Type B men who had stable wives with 13 or more years of education seemed to be protected from coronary disease. The relationship between coronary disease and husbands' characteristics showed case husbands to be more dominant and reflective regardless of their Type A/B behavior.     

Effects of husbands' smoking on the incidence of lung cancer in Korean women

BACKGROUND: Although smoking remains uncommon among Korean women, lung cancer mortality is rapidly escalating. METHODS: We investigated the effects of spousal smoking in 160130 Korean women, aged 40-88, who received health insurance from the Korea Medical Insurance Corporation (KMIC). Exposure data were collected during medical examinations conducted between April 1992 and June 1994. The primary outcome variable was the incidence of lung cancer defined by hospital admissions between July 1994 and December 1997. Standardized rates for the incidence of lung cancer were assessed according to the smoking habits of their husbands. RESULTS: At baseline (n = 160 130), 53.9% of husbands were smokers and 23.3% were ex-smokers, while 1.1% of wives (n = 1756) were current smokers and 0.6% (n = 938) were ex-smokers. During follow-up, 79 cases of lung cancer occurred among non-smoking wives (n = 157436). Wives of heavy smokers were found to have a higher risk of developing lung cancer. The husbands' smoking habits did not affect their wives' risk of developing other cancers such as those of the stomach, liver and cervix, but they did affect breast cancer, which has a significantly higher risk in relation to the longer duration of husbands' smoking. In Poission regression models, adjusting for the age of both husband and wife, socioeconomic status, occupation, residency and vegetable intake, the rate ratio (RR) of lung cancer in non-smoking wives was 1.9 (95% CI: 1.0-3.5) in current smokers and 1.3 (95% CI: 0.6-2.7) in ex-smokers. The RR of lung cancer was 3.1 (95% CI: 1.4-6.6) in wives of husbands who had smoked for 30 years or more compared with wives of non-smoking husbands. CONCLUSION: In Korea, the incidence of lung cancer is higher among non-smoking women whose husbands smoke, and a dose-response relationship seems to exist.     

Effects of education and other socioeconomic factors on middle age mortality in rural Bangladesh

STUDY OBJECTIVE: To examine socioeconomic gradients in mortality in adult women and their husbands in Bangladesh, paying particular attention to the independent effects of the educational status of each spouse. DESIGN: Historical cohort study. SETTING: Matlab, a rural area 60 km south east of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. PARTICIPANTS: 14803 married women aged 45 or over and their husbands who were resident in the Matlab Demographic Surveillance area between 30 June 1982 and 31 December 1998. MAIN RESULTS: Mortality was lower in women with formal or Koranic education compared with those with none (adjusted rate ratio for formal education = 0.68, 95% CI 0.53 to 0.86; adjusted rate ratio for Koranic schooling = 0.82, 95% CI 0.66 to 1.00). After adjusting for her own education, the husband's level of education or occupation did not have an independent effect on a woman's survival. Men who had attended formal education had lower mortality than those without any education (adjusted rate ratio = 0.84, 95% CI 0.75 to 0.93), but men whose wives had been educated had an additional survival advantage independent of their own education and occupation (adjusted rate ratio = 0.76, 95% CI 0.67 to 0.87). Mortality in both sexes was also significantly associated with marital status and the percentage of surviving children, and in men was associated with the man's occupation, religion, area of residence. CONCLUSIONS: The data suggest that socioeconomic status has a strong influence on mortality in adults in Bangladesh. They also illustrate how important the continued promotion of education, particularly for women, may be for the survival of both women and men in rural Bangladesh.     

Care for the other's selfhood: a view on child care and education through Heidegger's analytic of Dasein

Philosophical analysis concerning selfhood and care is of fundamental importance for child care and education. Martin Heidegger's analytic of Dasein introduces the concepts of self and care within the ontological domain while structuring the holistic understanding of human existence. Because of the ontological emphasis, Heidegger's concepts of self and care have mainly been overridden in relation to the more or less practical questions of child care and education. This article studies Heidegger's analytic of Dasein and its implications for the philosophy of child care and education. The interconnection between the phenomena of care and selfhood and the question of how to pay attention to a child's selfhood are studied in this article. As the outcome of the study, it is proposed that the analytic of Dasein, especially its ideas about selfhood and authentic care, could offer an advantageous ontological perspective for an elaboration of the theory of relational selfhood and reciprocal care.     

The effect of college education on mortality

We exploit exogenous variation in years of completed college induced by draft-avoidance behavior during the Vietnam War to examine the impact of college on adult mortality. Our estimates imply that increasing college attainment from the level of the state at the 25th percentile of the education distribution to that of the state at the 75th percentile would decrease cumulative mortality for cohorts in our sample by 8 to 10 percent relative to the mean. Most of the reduction in mortality is from deaths due to cancer and heart disease. We also explore potential mechanisms, including differential earnings and health insurance.     

The effect of early-life education on later-life mortality

Many studies link cross-state variation in compulsory schooling laws to early-life educational attainment, thereby providing a plausible way to investigate the causal impact of education on various lifetime outcomes. We use this strategy to estimate the effect of education on older-age mortality of individuals born in the early twentieth century U.S. Our key innovation is to combine U.S. Census data and the complete Vital Statistics records to form precise mortality estimates by sex, birth cohort, and birth state. In turn we find that virtually all of the variation in these mortality rates is captured by cohort effects and state effects alone, making it impossible to reliably tease out any additional impact due to changing educational attainment induced by state-level changes in compulsory schooling.     

Effects of a community-wide health education program on cardiovascular disease morbidity and mortality: the Stanford Five-City Project

The authors examined changes in morbidity and mortality from 1979 through 1992 during the Stanford Five-City Project, a comprehensive community health education study conducted in northern California. The intervention (1980-1986), a multiple risk factor strategy delivered through multiple educational methods, targeted all residents in two treatment communities. Potentially fatal and nonfatal myocardial infarction and stroke events were identified from death certificates and hospital records. Clinical information was abstracted from hospital charts and coroner records; for fatal events, it was collected from attending physicians and next of kin. Standard diagnostic criteria were used to classify all events, without knowledge of the city of origin. All first definite events were analyzed; denominators were estimated from 1980 and 1990 US Census figures. Mixed model regression analyses were used in statistical comparisons. Over the full 14 years of the study, the combined-event rate declined about 3% per year in all five cities. However, during the first 7-year period (1979-1985), no significant trends were found in any of the cities; during the late period (1986-1992), significant downward trends were found in all except one city. The change in trends between periods was slightly but not significantly greater in the treatment cities. It is most likely that some influence affecting all cities, not the intervention, accounted for the observed change.     

Mothers' education and childhood mortality in Ghana

The significant extent to which maternal education affects child health has been advanced in several sociodemographic-medical literature, but not much has been done in analysing the spatial dimension of the problem; and also using graphic and linear regression models of representation. In Ghana, very little has been done to relate the two variables and offer pragmatic explanations. The need to correlate the two, using a regression model, which is rarely applied in previous studies, is a methodological necessity. The paper examines the impact of mothers' education on childhood mortality in Ghana using, primarily, Ghana Demographic and Health Survey data of 1998 and World Bank data of 2000. The survey has emphatically established that there is an inverse relationship between mothers' education and child survivorship. The use of basic health facilities that relate to childhood survival shows a direct relationship with mothers' education. Recommendations for policy initiatives to simultaneously emphasise the education of the girl-child, and to ensure adequate access to maternal and child health services, have been made. The need for an experimental project of integrating maternal education and child health services has also been recommended. A linear regression model that illustrates the relationship between maternal education and childhood survival has emerged.     

Maternal education and child mortality in Zimbabwe

In 1980, Zimbabwe rapidly expanded access to secondary schools, providing a natural experiment to estimate the impact of increased maternal secondary education on child mortality. Exploiting age specific exposure to these reforms, we find that children born to mothers most likely to have benefited from the policies were about 21% less likely to die than children born to slightly older mothers. We also find that increased education leads to delayed age at marriage, sexual debut, and first birth and that increased education leads to better economic opportunities for women. We find little evidence supporting other channels through which increased education might affect child mortality. Expanding access to secondary schools may greatly accelerate declines in child mortality in the developing world today.     

Different effects of maternal and paternal education on early mortality in Norway

Summary. In order to separate the effects of maternal and paternal education on pregnancy outcome, a total population of 97526 single, firstborn infants and their parents was studied. Census information from 1980 was linked to the Medical Birth Registry for 1978–82. Children of parents with high education (> 12 years) were the most likely to survive the first year of life. There was a linear association between parental education and infant mortality. Examining parental education jointly, it was found that the father's educational level had the greatest impact on stillbirth. Mother's educational level seemed to be more closely associated with postneonatal mortality. Possible mechanism to explain the association between educational level and infant mortality are discussed.     

Influence of maternal education on infant and child mortality: levels and causes

Data from the World Fertility Survey in ten Third World countries are used to test the conclusion, based on a Nigerian study, that material education is important in reducing child mortality. The analysis confirms the major importance of parental education, the impact of which is probably greater than both income factors and access to health facilities combined. Rural/urban differentials are of small importance once parental education has been controlled. The findings of the Nigerian study are modified in that paternal education is also shown to be important, though not as important as maternal education, and the step from primary to secondary schooling is more important than that from illiteracy to primary schooling. The massive declines in child mortality during the last third of a century have been the result not only of technological and economic change but also of social change, of which the most important component for the survival of children through the first years of life has been parental education. It is suggested that schooling introduces parents to a global culture of largely Western origin and loosens their ties to traditional cultures. Age and sex differentiations in power, decision-making and benefits within the larger family are reduced when schooling brings about a new family system in which women and children are allocated higher priorities in terms of care and allocation of food and in which parents can make decisions about health and child care without reference to their elders.     

Differential impact of maternal education on under-five mortality in rural and urban India

Under-five mortality rate (U5MR) differs by rural-urban place of residence and mother's education; however, the rural-urban gap in U5MR by mother's educational attainment is unclear in the existing literature. Using five rounds of the national family health surveys (NFHS I–V) conducted between 1992–93 and 2019–21 in India, this study estimated the main and interaction effects of rural-urban and maternal education on U5MR. The mixed effect Cox proportional hazard (MECPH) model was used to predict the risk of under-five mortality (U5M). The finding shows that unadjusted U5MR remained 50 per cent higher in rural areas than in urban areas across the surveys. Whereas, after controlling for demographic, socioeconomic, and maternal health care predictors of U5M, the MECPH regression results indicated that urban children had a higher risk of death than their rural counterparts in NFHS I-III. However, there are no significant rural-urban differences in the last two surveys (NFHS IV -V). In addition, increasing maternal education levels were associated with lower U5M in all surveys. Though, in recent years, primary education has had no significant effect. The U5M risk was additionally lower for urban children than rural children whose mothers had secondary and higher education by NFHS-III; however, this additional urban advantage was no longer significant in recent surveys. The higher impact of secondary education on U5MR in urban areas in the past may be attributed to poor socio-economic, healthcare conditions in rural areas. Overall, maternal education, particularly secondary education, remained a protective factor for U5M in both rural and urban areas, even after controlling for predictors. Therefore, there is a need to increase the focus on secondary education for girls for a further decline in U5M.     

Physical and sexual abuse of wives in urban Bangladesh: husbands' reports

Using data from 8,320 husbands'self reports for the 2006 Urban Health Survey, this article examines the prevalence of physical and sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetrated by husbands against their wives in Bangladesh and identifies risk markers associated with such violence. Of the men included in the sample for this study, 55 percent reported perpetrating physical IPV against their wives at some point in their married lives, 23 percent reported perpetrating physical IPV in the past year, 20 percent reported ever perpetrating sexual IPV, and 60 percent reported ever perpetrating physical or sexual IPV. Bivariate analyses revealed that men residing in slums had a greater likelihood than those residing in nonslum areas and in district municipalities of perpetrating lifetime and past-year physical IPV, and any lifetime (physical or sexual) IPV. Lifetime sexual IPV prevalence, by contrast, was highest in district municipalities (26 percent), followed by slum (20 percent) and nonslum (17 percent) areas. Net of other factors, low socioeconomic levels were associated with men's increased likelihood of perpetrating IPV. Alcohol and drug use, sexually transmitted disease infection, poor mental health, and holding attitudes supportive of wife beating were predictive of IPV perpetration. These results suggest that IPV-prevention programs targeting men should consider spousal abuse, substance use, and sexual risk behaviors as social and public health problems and should also consider the sociocultural context within which men who abuse their partners are embedded.     

Effects of ovariectomy and orchiectomy on lead-induced mortality in rats

Young adult rats were administered a single injection of lead acetate. For each group the median-effective dose (LD₅₀) was determined on the 2nd, 4th, and 8th day following treatment. Female rats demonstrated greater LD₅₀ values than comparably treated males of the same age. Rats that were ovariectomized 1 week prior to the lead insult appear to be more vulnerable to lead toxicity than their sham-operated controls. For the male groups, however, there were no apparent differences in mortality responses to lead acetate injection between orchiectomized and sham-operated rodents.     

Effects of antenatal testing laws on infant mortality

Even though syphilis can be prevented effectively and treated inexpensively, it has remained a global public health problem. Untreated congenital syphilis results in neonatal death, stillbirth, preterm birth, or congenital deformities. Many developing countries have recently instituted syphilis prevention programs in antenatal care, but there has not been a systematic study of the effects of such programs. This paper is the first to study antenatal testing laws initiated in the U.S. in 1938–1947 which mandated physicians and other persons permitted by law to attend to a pregnant woman to test her for syphilis. We use the variation in the timing of state antenatal testing laws to estimate the laws’ effect on neonatal mortality rates and deaths due to preterm birth. Using 1931–1947 Vital Statistics data, we find that these laws decreased neonatal mortality rates of nonwhites by 3.15 per 1000 live births (a 8.6% reduction) while having no discernible impact on whites. The laws contributed to an 18% narrowing of the white-nonwhite neonatal mortality gap by 1947. Using 1950 U.S. Census data, we find that mandatory antenatal testing led to a 7% increase in the cohort size of nonwhite poor, which is consistent with the neonatal mortality results. We find universal antenatal testing to be very cost-effective, with an estimated $7600 cost (in 2013 dollars) per life-year saved.