Measuring power

This paper focuses on dynamics within couples, although the authors recognize that dynamics among extended family members and across generations are of substantial interest. Decisions about resource allocations, control over economic resources, whether and how much one works, are all examined.Households. ,Resource allocation. ,Labor. ,Gender. ,

The effects of access to health care on infant mortality in Indonesia

This paper examines the impact of access to health facilities and personnel on infant and child mortality in Indonesia. Demographic and Health Survey data are combined with village-level censuses of infrastructure collected by the Central Bureau of Statistics. Because the village-level data are available from two points in time, it is possible to analyse the effects on mortality risks within the village of changes in access to health care. Factors about villages that might affect both access to health care and mortality risks are held constant. Adding a maternity clinic to a village decreases the odds of infant mortality by almost 15 per cent, in comparison to the risk before the clinic was added. An additional doctor reduces the odds by about 1.7 per cent

Findings from Two Decades of Family Planning Research

This book presents a selection of empirical conclusions, or findings, from the body of family planning research that has accumulated over the last two decades. Twelve topics of current interest are reviewed, as a sequel to three similar publications issued in 1971, 1972, and 1974. A findings document compresses what has been learned into straightforward declarative statements, giving summary evidence to support each statement. In cases where a conclusion is well founded, with extensive supporting evidence, only illustrative or summary references are needed. In other cases, citations are required for individual studies. Generalizations that are unsupported or too ambiguous to permit a definite statement do not qualify for inclusion. Methodology and theory are not the primary concern; rather, the focus is on research results that merit particular attention. Thus, solid conclusions are included, along with important evidence. It is important to establish a record outlining evidence that underlies each finding, with identification of which country or region it comes from. With time, this record should evolve, and then the current compilation will serve as a point of departure for restatement

Study Of The Tsunami Aftermath And Recovery (STAR): Ketahanan dan Pemulihan di Sumatra Setelah Tsunami

Tsunami di Samudera Hindia pada tahun 2004 telah menghancurkan ribuan komunitas di negara-negara yang berbatasan dengan Samudera Hindia. Kerusakan paling parah terjadi di Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam dan Provinsi Sumatera Utara, di mana diperkirakan 170.000 jiwa tewas dan ratusan kilometer lingkungan di sepanjang garis pantai hancur. Bencana Tsunami ini telah mendorong diberikannya bantuan yang begitu besar baik dari Pemerintah Indonesia, LSM dan donor bagi kedua provinsi ini. Pada tahun 2007, upaya untuk membangun kembali daerah yang terdampak Tsunami di Indonesia tercatat sebagai proyek rekonstruksi yang paling besar yang pernah dilakukan di sebuah negara berkembang. Studi Paska Tsunami dan Pemulihannya (The Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery) atau STAR merupakan sebuah studi longitudinal yang mengumpulkan informasi dari individu, rumah tangga, komunitas dan fasilitas di Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam dan Provinsi Sumatera Utara. Studi dirancang untuk mengumpulkan data tentang dampak Tsunami Tahun 2004 baik dampak pendek maupun dampak jangka panjang serta berbagai upaya pemulihan yang dilakukan. Untuk mengetahui dampak Tsunami terhadap kehidupan individu, komunitas dan keluarga serta bagaimana respon mereka terhadap bencana tersebut, kami melaksanakan STAR. Pada tahun 2005 kami mulai dengan mengunjungi kembali 32.000 responden, tersebar dalam 487 komunitas yang sebelumnya pada tahun 2004 sudah pernah diwawancarai dalam survei rumah tangga oleh BPS (Survei Pra-Tsunami). Wawancara paska Tsunami kami lakukan setiap tahun selama 5 tahun sesudah terjadinya Tsunami. Sebanyak 98% dari responden BPS tersebut selamat dari bencana Tsunami di mana kami kemudian berhasil mewawancarai 96% dari mereka, untuk setidaknya sekali dari rangkaian wawancara paska Tsunami yang kami lakukan. Data yang dihasilkan dari studi ini memberikan informasi tentang dampak jangka pendek yang dialami oleh masyarakat dan upaya pemulihan di wilayah-wilayah yang paling parah terdampak Tsunami, yang mana kemudian kami bandingkannya dengan kehidupan masyarakat di wilayah yang tidak terdampak atau hanya sedikit terdampak Tsunami. Kami akan melaporkan hasil studi kami berdasarkan data yang dikumpulkan sejak tahun 2004 sampai tahun 2010. Saat ini kami sedang melakukan survei lanjutan 10 tahun setelah Tsunami

Small advances and swift retreat: Race-conscious educational policy in the Obama and Trump administrations

The three terms comprising the Obama and Trump presidencies provide an opportunity to understand the evolution of race-conscious education policy in an increasingly multiracial, unequal, and divided society. Through document review and interviews with civil rights lawyers, government officials, congressional staffers, and intermediary organization personnel, we sought to understand how Obama officials envisioned and changed the role of the federal government in fostering K-12 race-conscious educational policies and what mechanisms they used to advance priorities. We also explored changes Trump administration officials made to federal civil rights policies and through which institutional means. Our findings reveal through-lines between past and present political agendas and the methods for enactment. Obama’s interagency efforts to reinvigorate civil rights oversight and enforcement in education harkened back to the mid-1960s era of bipartisan cooperation around school desegregation. Yet the decades-long legal and policy retrenchment against civil rights advances made in the 1960s constrained further progress. Trump’s administration advocated for the privatization of public education through increased choice and opposed race-consciousness in education law and policy. The reshaping of the federal judiciary under Trump presents challenges for race-consciousness in the law for years to come. Recognizing these consistent through-lines and constraints will be essential for advocates and policymakers going forward

Effects of Housing Aid on Psychosocial Health after a Disaster

Little is known about whether the provision of aid in the aftermath of a large-scale natural disaster affects psychological well-being. We investigate the effects of housing assistance, a key element of the reconstruction program implemented after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Population-representative individual-level longitudinal data collected in Aceh, Indonesia, during the decade after the tsunami as part of the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR) are used. Housing aid was targeted to people whose homes were destroyed and, to a lesser extent, damaged by the tsunami and to those who lived, at the time of the tsunami, in communities that sustained the greatest damage. The effects of receipt of aid on post-traumatic stress reactivity (PTSR) are examined using panel data models that take into account observed and unobserved individual-specific fixed characteristics that affect both PTSR and aid receipt, drawing comparisons in each survey wave between individuals who had been living in the same kecamatan when the tsunami hit. Those who received aid have better psychological health; the effects increase with time since aid receipt and are the greatest at two years or longer after the receipt. The effects are concentrated among those whose homes were destroyed in the tsunami

Lost but Not Forgotten: Attrition and Follow-up in the Indonesia Family Life Survey

Data from three waves of the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) are used to examine follow-up and attrition in the context of a large scale panel survey conducted in a low-income setting. Household-level attrition between the baseline and first follow-up four years later is less than 6 percent; the cumulative attrition between the baseline and second follow-up after a five-year hiatus is 5 percent. Attrition is low in the IFLS because movers are followed: around 12 percent of households that were interviewed in the first follow-up had moved from their location at baseline. About half of those households were 'local movers.' The other half, many of whom had moved to a new province, were interviewed during a second sweep through the study areas ('second tracking'). Regression analyses indicate that in terms of household- level characteristics at baseline, households interviewed during second tracking are very similar to those not interviewed in the follow-up surveys. Local movers are more similar to the households found in the baseline location in the follow-ups. The results suggest that the information content of households interviewed during second tracking is probably high. The cost of following those respondents is relatively modest in the IFLS. Although the analytical value of reinterviewing movers will vary depending on the specifics of the research, we conclude that, in general, tracking movers is a worthwhile investment in longitudinal household surveys conducted in settings where communication infrastructure is limited.

Economic Shocks, Wealth and Welfare

The immediate effects of the Asian crisis on the well-being of Indonesians are examined using the Indonesia Family Life Survey, an ongoing longitudinal household survey. There is tremendous diversity in the effect of the shock: for some households, it was devastating; for others it brought new opportunities. A wide array of mechanisms was adopted in response to the crisis. Households combined to more fully exploit benefits of scale economies in consumption. Labor supply increased even as real wages collapsed. Households reduced spending on semidurables while maintaining expenditures on foods. Rural households used wealth, particularly gold, to smooth consumption.

Studying Displacement After a Disaster Using Large-Scale Survey Methods: Sumatra After the 2004 Tsunami

Understanding of human vulnerability to environmental change has advanced in recent years, but measuring vulnerability and interpreting mobility across many sites differentially affected by change remains a significant challenge. Drawing on longitudinal data collected on the same respondents who were living in coastal areas of Indonesia before the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and were re-interviewed after the tsunami, this paper illustrates how the combination of population-based survey methods, satellite imagery and multivariate statistical analyses has the potential to provide new insights into vulnerability, mobility and impacts of major disasters on population well-being. The data are used to map and analyze vulnerability to post-tsunami displacement across the provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra and to compare patterns of migration after the tsunami between damaged areas and areas not directly affected by the tsunami. The comparison reveals that migration after a disaster is less selective overall than migration in other contexts. Gender and age, for example, are strong predictors of moving from undamaged areas but are not related to displacement in areas experiencing damage. In our analyses traditional predictors of vulnerability do not always operate in expected directions. Low levels of socioeconomic status and education were not predictive of moving after the tsunami, although for those who did move, they were predictive of displacement to a camp rather than a private home. This survey-based approach, though not without difficulties, is broadly applicable to many topics in human-environment research, and potentially opens the door to rigorous testing of new hypotheses in this literature

Mapping Forest Aboveground Biomass Using Multisource Remotely Sensed Data

The majority of the aboveground biomass on the Earth’s land surface is stored in forests. Thus, forest biomass plays a critical role in the global carbon cycle. Yet accurate estimate of forest aboveground biomass (FAGB) remains elusive. This study proposed a new conceptual model to map FAGB using remotely sensed data from multiple sensors. The conceptual model, which provides guidance for selecting remotely sensed data, is based on the principle of estimating FAGB on the ground using allometry, which needs species, diameter at breast height (DBH), and tree height as inputs. Based on the conceptual model, we used multiseasonal Landsat images to provide information about species composition for the forests in the study area, LiDAR data for canopy height, and the image texture and image texture ratio at two spatial resolutions for tree crown size, which is related to DBH. Moreover, we added RaDAR data to provide canopy volume information to the model. All the data layers were fed to a Random Forest (RF) regression model. The study was carried out in eastern North Carolina. We used biomass from the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis plots to train and test the model performance. The best model achieved an R2 of 0.625 with a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 18.8 Mg/ha (47.6%) with the “out-of-bag” samples at 30 × 30 m spatial resolution. The top five most important variables include the 95th, 85th, 75th, and 50th percentile heights of the LiDAR points and their standard deviations of 85th heights. Numerous features from multiseasonal Sentinel-1 C-Band SAR, multiseasonal Landsat 8 imagery along with image texture features from very high-resolution imagery were selected. But the importance of the height metrics dwarfed all other variables. More tests of the conceptual model in places with a broader range of biomass and more diverse species composition are needed to evaluate the importance of other input variables