Household structure and child nutrition: A reinterpretation of income and mother's education

Abstract

Two frequently used predictors of child malnutrition are family income and mother's education. Despite their common sense rationale, they pose difficult and perhaps intractable problems of measurement and conceptualization. This paper proposes to substitute the concepts of family and maternal differentiation for these traditionally used indicators. Differentiation is defined as the capacity of the individual or group to process a diversity of information categories. Using data from a recent survey of households in Panama, indicators of this concept were constructed at the family and at the maternal levels using principal component analysis. These are shown to predict a range of indicators of childrens' nutritional status when appropriate control variables are included in the regression analysis. The same analysis was then repeated with income and mother's education replacing the differentiation measures. The results support our claim that the differentiation indicators are superior, and we argue that an even more important reason for using them is that they open the door to a long-term research program that is theoretically consistent and potentially cumulative.