Interactions

Return to Kenya Questions

Interactions are not something that should be stumbled upon or come as a surprise, instead they should be something explored because of legitimate suspicion and previous documentation. The that is posed in this exercise looks at the possibility that contraceptive use by the mother might improve a child’s nutrition status differently for mothers with higher education. The possibilities could be that mothers with more education are using the contraceptives more effectively and a child in a smaller family will have better care and likely access to a greater amount of food. The research question follows:

Is family planning useful in improving children’s nutrition status for mothers with primary education or more?

The question should help determine how to target a family planning program and what the constraints to success are for family planning. In Kenya, it is especially relevant to look at the possible effect of controlling family size on the nutrition status of the children. Because poverty is common and both access to food and amount of care for a child is influenced by family size, it is important to look at how and when family planning methods are effective. The first step is to identify if there is a difference in the use of contraceptives among those with at least primary education versus those mothers with less than primary school education.

To look at this question, it is first necessary to create categories that define the differences between low and high education and use of contraceptive methods. If any variable is on a continuum, then a histogram is used to eye-ball reasonable cut-points to evenly divide the categories and recoding is used to create a new categorical variable. The category for contraceptive use is already categorized, but it should be collapsed into fewer categories for more appropriate coding. The education (dlowedn) is already a dummy variable for 1= low education (<primary) and 0=not low (primary or more).

	Create appropriate categories for the variables of interest to perform the analysis
	Run means to see the differences between the groups for literacy and contraceptive use
	Graph differences in mean WAZ score for contraceptive use and categories of literacy
	Report the findings