Population Center Research Themes: Population Health

 

Population Health Research Projects

Project Title:  Online game playing: self-control and impacts on well-being.
BPC Affiliate:  Stefano DellaVigna ([link? To what?], with Dan Acland and Vince Chow
Funding: BPC
Description:  Online game playing is thought to have implications for mental and physical health, as well as social and psychological development, with evidence of both negative and positive effects.  They explore the optimality of game-playing behavior, as well as the effect of game-playing on wellbeing and academic performance, in a series of online field-experiments.  The basic strategy is to offer players of online computer games a software application that allows them to set limits and/or blocks on when, and for how long they play. In short, this program is a commitment device to limit time spent playing. The investigators then will look at how players use this device, how their game-playing behavior changes, the effect on various measures of productivity and quality-of-life, and their willingness to pay to keep or get rid of the device. 

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Project Title: Ethnicity and Phenotype Roles in Multiple Sclerosis DNA Methylation
BPC Affiliate:  Lisa Barcellos
Funding: BPC
Description: This study aims to determine whether differences in the progression of multiple sclerosis (MS) experienced by African Americans compared with European Americans are associated with DNA methylation profiles.  The research first must determine whether DNA methylation profiles are associated with risk for MS; and then to determine whether DNA methylation profiles are associated with particular clinical MS phenotypes.

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Project Title:  Selection In Utero: A Test of Competing Explanations
BPC Affiliate: Ray Catalano
Funding: BPC and ???
Description: This study tests two hypotheses of spontaneous miscarriages: (1) the damaged-cohort hypothesis, that stress causes more selectivity of fetuses surviving to term, and male fetuses are more likely to miscarry because they are less likely to be hardy and survive, and (2) the culled-cohort hypothesis, is that there is no selectivity, but simply that the stress increases miscarriage rates.  In both cases, the sex-ratio is changed, but they also lead to opposing predictions of male longevity in high or low sex ratio birth cohorts. 

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Project Title:  The effect of day care availability on child development and maternal labor supply. 
BPC Affiliate: Lia Fernald and Paul Gertler
Funding: BPC
Other Themes: Family, Data Collection, labor
Description:  Increasing female labor force employment and availability of day care are believed to be intertwined, although little research in less developed countries has been conducted. Further, access to day care is believed to improve nutritional and developmental outcomes for children.  It is further plausible that increasing daycare availability frees older siblings from day care, allowing parents to invest in the children’s education.  This study will evaluate a program in Mexico regarding day care and women’s labor force participation. 

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Project Title:  Obstetric Complications and Preterm Delivery in California Women with Depression
BPC Affiliate: Sylvia Guendelman, with Dorothy Thornton
Funding: BPC
Other Themes: Innovative Methods
Description:   NEED PROPOSAL!! Search Emails

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Project Title:  The impact of neighborhoods, alcohol outlets and violence on health disparities in low birth weight among African-American, Hispanic and White Women in California.
BPC Affiliate: Denise Herd
Funding: BPC, RWJ
Other Themes: Family
Description:  The proposed project builds on a recently completed study of the ecological correlates of low birth weight (LBW) in black, white and Hispanic women living in the same geographic areas in California, which found that neighborhood indicators of drug abuse and densities of alcohol outlets were associated with low birth weight among women of all three ethnic groups examined in the study. These effects were strongest for African American women.  The major goals of the project are to complete new analyses to determine the relationships of alcohol outlets and ethnicity with low birth weight when more refined indicators of neighborhood drug and alcohol use, and measures of crime and violence are included in the models.  This will enable us to test whether the association between outlets and low birth weight can be attributed to drinking behavior or to the presence of crime and violence often linked with alcohol outlets.  The analyses will also provide data on whether the relationships between these variables differ for black, white and Hispanic women.

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Project Title: Qualitative Supplement to Conditional Cash Transfer Study in Tanzania
BPC Affiliate: Ann Swidler and Will Dow
Funding: BPC, Hewlett
Other Themes: Labor, Innovative Methods
Description:  This supplements an already existing study, to field a qualitative component for an HIV prevention randomized intervention trial in Tanzania. The qualitative effort will help us to gain a more complete understanding of how the conditional cash transfers provided for those who remain uninfected affect the decision-making processes of participants, especially as regards sexual and reproductive health.  This effort will lead to a better understanding of how participants in the first phase of the study respond to the cash reward plus counseling and testing intervention (intervention group) and the testing and counseling only intervention (control group), and to understand the impact that the repeated testing and counseling is having on the control group.

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Project Title: Improved Stoves for Health and Environmental Sustainability
BPC Affiliate: David Levine
Funding: BPC, Solar Household Energy (SHE), TOSTAN
Other Themes: Labor
Description: The goal of this project is to measure how well solar ovens can reduce the consumption of biomass fuel use and the associated ills in the developing world.  The research in this proposal is the first stage in a project to scale-up access to carbon credits and the dissemination of solar ovens and other safe stoves across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.  The lessons and methods learned here will apply to other low-emissions stoves and should help spur their dissemination

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Project Title:  Children’s growth in changing nutritional and economic environments: a longitudinal study.
BPC Affiliate: Lia Fernald with Jenna Nobles
Funding:  BPC, RWJ
Other Themes: Data collection
Description:   To contribute to the growing body of research at the intersection of population health and economic demography by extending current literature on children’s physical growth and development.  To do so, the investigators will analyze data from a novel 10-year longitudinal cohort study accompanying the roll out of Oportunidades (formerly PROGRESA), a large social program targeted at poverty reduction in Mexico.  Second, to complete such analysis, they seek to resolve a fundamental problem in the data and by doing so, create a public record of the existing data issues and public cross-walk files for other researchers to successfully (and correctly) link children’s records across the 10 years of survey waves.

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Project Title:  Poverty, gender inequalities and sexual/reproductive health: an impact evaluation of combined economic and psycho-social intervention in south Tanzania.
BPC Affiliate: Will Dow
Funding: PRB
Other Themes: Data collection
Description:

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Project Title: 
BPC Affiliate: Ted Miguel
Funding: NICHD
Other Themes: Family, Labor, Innovative Methods
Description:  Goals are to build on an existing database of educational, health, and nutritional outcomes for school children in western Kenya (collected from 1998-2002), and extend it for an additional six years, in order to estimate the impact of improved child health and nutrition on long-run life outcomes. The proposed study will examine the long-run impact of a recent school-based health project - free medical treatment for intestinal helminths (worms), a serious health problem for Kenyan children - that took place in 75 rural primary schools. Medical treatment was randomly "phased in" to a subset of schools between 1998 and 2001. Schools phased into the assistance project in earlier years have served as "treatment schools", and those phased in later as "comparison schools". The proposed study will track pupils in these schools for six more years. The resulting dataset - the Kenyan Life Panel Survey (KLPS) - will contain unique longitudinal educational, labor market, health, nutritional, demographic, and cognitive information for 6,800 children over ten years (1998-2008). The study allows us to examine whether these educational gains persist through time, and if they translate into labor market or fertility impacts as the children enter adulthood. If there are strong links between child health gains (from deworming) and adult human capital formation and poverty, the results of the proposed study may justify increased investment in child health and nutrition programs. Large-scale, interdisciplinary, multi-use longitudinal (panel) household datasets running over ten years are very rare in less developed countries, and particularly in Africa, and there are many possible research uses for the dataset that do not rely on the deworming experiment. We plan to make the complete KLPS dataset publicly available at no cost to other investigators by the end of the project.

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