The Health Status of Mothers and Children

Abstract

<p>This is an investigation of the relationship between family structure, socioeconomic status and the health status of mothers and children. A population health framework underlies the analysis. The first essay uses three population health surveys to study the differences in the health status of mothers from two-parent families with those from one-parent families. Lone mothers have, on average, lower unconditional health status than married mothers. However, lone mothers are, on average, younger, poorer, less educated, have fewer children and smoke more. Controlling for these factors, a negative relationship between lone motherhood and health status (compared with married mothers) can be rejected. The second and fourth essays investigate the relationship between family structure and socioeconomic status and child health. The second essay uses the Ontario Child Health Survey (OCHS), 1983 and 1987. Health status is measured by the HU12 scores. The results indicate that lone-mother status has a strong negative relationship with child health as does low-permanent income (long term poverty), even after controlling for low birth-weight. However, no consistent relationship with current income is found. The National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) is employed in the fourth essay. The findings are similar to hose obtained from the OCHS study. Lone-mother status has a strong, robust, negative relationship with child health status; current income does not. The third essay presents the development of the algorithm used to map the OCHS responses into the Health Utilities Index Mark 2 (HUI2) attribute levels used in the second essay. The mapping system is compared to others. While a major difference is seen when applying two different algorithms to the same data, there seems to be little difference when applying the different algorithms to similar populations from different data sets.</p>