South Africa - Measuring Social Connection and Children’s Well-Being Using Multiple Data Sources

The research will develop improved measures of social connection through coordinated analyses of intensive ethnographic data and AHDSS data. The quantitative component will accompany past and further analysis of the Children’s Well Being and Social Connection project (CWSC), led by Townsend and Madhavan and conducted between 2002 and 2004. We aim to convert AHDSS database elements into a map of intra-household social and kinship networks by developing rosters of kin, by using vital events and household relationships to establish the locations and survivorship of kin, and by incorporating measures of the human capital resources of kin.

The immediate aims of this work are three-fold: 1) determine which indicators of social connection identified in CWSC can be measured using the data from the AHDSS; 2) measure the completeness of representativeness of social indicators by comparing baseline characteristics of individuals having complete social networks maps and those without; 3) develop preliminary explanatory models of child health and well-being outcomes that build intra-household network variables on top of traditional models that use only intra-household connections and measures of spatial association as proxies for social context. We will thus incorporate measures of intra-household kinship association and geographic association as controls for our base social connection models.

The current request will represent the first of two extractions agreed on for this study. Here we request all vital event, household membership, and network status variables necessary for building a longitudinal database of social connections. We also request a limited range of individual status variables for inclusion as dependent variables and as attributes of network partners for use as independent variables. Upon completion of Migration Reconciliation (MR) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data collection and assessment of network coverage, we will request a second extraction to include full MR, GIS, and additional variables from AHDSS occasional modules.

Mixed. Unit of analysis will be individual, but with critical linkages to Household, Village, and kin within and outside household.