Gansu Survey of Children and Families
The Gansu Survey of Children and Families (GSCF) is a longitudinal, multi-level study of rural children's welfare outcomes, including education, health, and psycho-social development. The study focuses on the following issues:
- Children's academic achievement, educational attitudes, behaviors, and experiences, psycho-social development, and physical health.
- Attitudes and practices of children, families, and teachers about parenting and schooling.
- The mechanisms (home, community, school) linking poverty to children's welfare outcomes.
- Rural children's human capital acquisition and subsequent labor outcomes.
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Publication Ability and Intrahousehold Allocation in Gansu Province, China(2010-05-13) Leight, JessicaThis paper analyzes the strategies employed by households in rural China to allo- cate educational expenditure to children of dierent endowment, examining whether parents use educational funding to reinforce or compensate for variation in endow- ment. Employing climatic shocks as an instrument for children's endowment yields results indicating that parental expenditure is preferentially directed to children of lower endowment. This result appears robust to the potentially confounding effects of gender and grade level and holds across a number of measures of expenditure. This analysis is consistent with a hypothesis that parents use the allocation of household resources to compensate for differences in endowment among their children.Publication Parental Education and Investment in Children’s Human Capital in Rural China(2006-07-01) Brown, Philip HThe landmark study of race and education in the United States known as the "Coleman Report" (Coleman et al. 1966) concluded that family characteristics are more important determinants of educational achievement than school quality or teacher experience, particularly in the early stages of schooling. From this result sprang two prominent lines of academic inquiry. The first focuses on so-called education production functions (e.g., Hanushek 1997), with an eye toward cost-benefit analyses of various investments in teachers and schools. These studies often pay little attention to family background variables, treating them as exogenous controls. The second line of inquiry seeks to promote social policies that foster student achievement by studying why family background has such a pronounced effect on children's acquisition of human capital.Publication Do health sector reforms have their intended impacts?: The World Bank's Health VIII project in Gansu province, China(2007-05-01) Wagstaff, Adam; Yu, ShengchaoThis paper combines differences-in-differences with propensity score matching to estimate the impacts of a health reform project in China that combined supply-side interventions aimed at improving the effectiveness and quality of care with demand-side measures aimed at expanding health insurance and providing financial support to the very poor. Data from household, village and facility surveys suggest the project reduced out-of-pocket spending, and the incidence of catastrophic spending and impoverishment through health expenses. Little impact is detected on the use of services, and while the evidence points to the project reducing sickness days, the evidence on health outcomes is mixed.Publication Beyond Cost: Rural Perspectives on Barriers to Education(2008-12-31) Hannum, Emily C.; Adams, JenniferIn China, education plays an increasingly important role in the creation of wealth and poverty. In the reform era, education has become closely tied to earnings (Yang 2005; Zhang et al. 2005). Returns to education in urban China increased significantly from 1978 to 1993, though returns were still relatively low in 1993, at less than four percent per year of schooling (Zhao and Zhou 2006). More recent trend data based on National Bureau of Statistics surveys show rapid increases in economic returns to a year of education in urban China: returns nearly tripled during the period 1992 to 2003, rising from 4.0 to 11.4 percent (Zhang and Zhao 2006). In rural areas, by the year 2000, an additional year of education increased wages by 6.4 percent among those engaged in wage employment, and education is becoming the dominant factor that determines whether rural laborers are successful in finding more lucrative off-farm jobs (de Brauw et al. 2002; de Brauw and Rozelle 2007; Zhao 1997). Given the rising role of education as a determinant of economic status, those who lack access to schooling are at high risk for a life of poverty.Publication Family Sources of Educational Gender Inequality in Rural China: A Critical Assessment(2008-11-17) Hannum, Emily C.; Kong, Peggy A.; Zhang, YupingIn this paper, we investigate the gender gap in education in rural northwest China. We first discuss parental perceptions of abilities and appropriate roles for girls and boys; parental concerns about old-age support; and parental perceptions of different labor market outcomes for girls' and boys' education. We then investigate gender disparities in investments in children, children's performance at school, and children's subsequent attainment. We analyze a survey of nine to twelve year-old children and their families conducted in rural Gansu Province in the year 2000, along with follow-up information about subsequent educational attainment collected seven years later. We complement our main analysis with two illustrative case studies of rural families drawn from 11 months of fieldwork conducted in rural Gansu between 2003 and 2005 by the second author. In 2000, most mothers expressed egalitarian views about girls' and boys' rights and abilities, in the abstract. However, the vast majority of mothers still expected to rely on sons for old-age support, and nearly one in five mothers interviewed agreed with the traditional saying, "Sending girls to school is useless since they will get married and leave home." Compared to boys, girls faced somewhat lower (though still very high) maternal educational expectations and a greater likelihood of being called on for household chores than boys. However, there was little evidence of a gender gap in economic investments in education. Girls rivaled or outperformed boys in academic performance and engagement. Seven years later, boys had attained just about a third of a year more schooling than girls — a quite modest advantage that could not be fully explained by early parental attitudes and investments, or student performance or engagement. Fieldwork confirmed that parents of sons and daughters tended to have high aspirations for their children. Parents sometimes viewed boys as having greater aptitude, but tended to view girls as having more dedication — an attribute parents perceived as being critical for educational success. Findings suggest that at least in Gansu, rural parental educational attitudes and practices toward boys and girls are more complicated and less uniformly negative for girls than commonly portrayed.Publication Short- and Long-Term Outcomes of the Left Behind in China: Education, Well-Being and Life Opportunities(2018-01-01) Hannum, Emily; Hu, Li-Chung; Shen, WensongThis report addresses the scope of China’s left-behind phenomenon and its roots in migration and education policies. It reviews evidence about disadvantages associated with left-behind status and discusses recent policy responses to the left-behind phenomenon. Empirical evidence is drawn from a national study of middle school students and a 15-year longitudinal case-study of children from rural Gansu, China. While a number of prior studies have shown mixed findings about the scale of educational disadvantage of left-behind children, compared to other groups, evidence presented here indicates that even after adjusting for school or community and household socioeconomic status, there are multiple domains in which homes of left-behind children are disadvantaged. They tend to live in households characterized by poorer health resources, cultural resources and social resources. By definition, they lose access, at least temporarily, to the “human capital” of their absent parents. Children in the short term thus experience more physiological, psychological, and (in the national comparison) educational disadvantages than their non-left-behind counterparts. In the long-term, our case study from Gansu Province suggests that father absence is associated with reduced educational attainment and possibly greater propensity to migrate, but not employment or long-term family relations. Overall, disadvantages appear to be more consistent and more generalized for mother-absent and dual-parent-absent families than for father-absent families. We discuss policy responses, and possible policy strategies, in the closing segment of the report. Policy reforms that obviate the need for children to be left behind are one evident solution to the problem, and some steps appear to be happening in this direction, but local resistance may be substantial. More immediately, boarding schools and community centers are commonly-proposed policy solutions to address the immediate needs of left-behind children, with promise but some clear pitfalls. Other possible supports are discussed.Publication Stark Choices: Work-Family Trade-Offs among Migrant Women and Men in Urban China(2019-06-19) Zhao, MenghanChina’s so-called “floating population” of rural-urban labor migrants includes rising numbers of couples and families migrating together. Labor market outcomes may differ for migrant men and women, in part due to family obligations, but few recent studies have investigated this possibility. This paper focuses on the relationship of labor outcomes with family obligations among migrant men and women and considers whether this relationship differs among those with higher and lower earnings potential. We perform nested logit models of employment status and OLS regression analyses of income, using a nationally-representative survey collected in 2013. For migrant women, childcare responsibilities are negatively associated with employment and income. In contrast, for migrant men, being co-resident with children has no bearing on probability of being employed full-time and is sometimes positively associated with income. Further, the “motherhood penalty” in income is most pronounced among migrant women with the least education. Results illustrate the embeddedness of individual migration decisions and outcomes within families. Findings also highlight a stark choice facing many migrant women: between earning for their children and living with them.Publication School violence in China: A multi-level analysis of student victimization in rural middle schools(2016-12-05) Adams, JenniferMotivation: Physical victimization at school is little studied in impoverished developing country contexts. Moreover, the role of school and classroom contexts as risk factors remains poorly understood. Purpose: The aim of the study is to investigate the prevalence of physical victimization in rural Chinese middle schools as well as the individual, teacher/classroom, and school level risk factors associated with experiencing physical victimization. Design: We use two waves of longitudinal, representative survey data to perform a multi-level logistic regression analysis of physical victimization among middle school students from 100 villages in one of China’s poorest provinces. We focus on a subset of questionnaire items that were gathered from students when the sampled children were 13-16 years old. We also utilize student data from the first wave of the survey to control for prior internalizing problems and academic achievement. Finally, we link matched data collected from principal and teacher questionnaires to examine the risk factors for physical victimization associated with students’ microclimates and the wider school environment. Findings: A substantial proportion of middle school students (40%) reported having been beaten by classmates. Elevated risk was found among males; students with prior poor performance in language; students with past internalizing problems; students of female teachers and teachers evaluated as low performing; students in disruptive classrooms; and students in classrooms undergoing mandated reforms. Implications: These findings suggest that efforts to reduce school violence should not focus on the deficits of individual students, but rather should target practices to alter the within school risk factors associated with micro-climates.Publication A Study on Educational Production Function in Western Regions of China(2008-01-01) Xue, Haiping; Min, WeifangThis paper uses the method of educational production function and hierarchical linear model to analyze the determinant factors of education quality in rural secondary schools in the Gansu province with the data of "The Gansu Survey of Children and Families in 2004".Results show that education quality in rural secondary schools in the Gansu province varies significantly among the student-level,the class-level and the school-level.The socio-economic status of student family and school peers put significantly effects on education quality.Teacher quality makes an important effect on education quality.The class size has a significantly negative effect on education quality.The decentralization of administrative power in school has a significantly positive effect on education quality.Based on the above findings,four aspects of policy suggestions are put forward to improve the education quality for the rural secondary school in the west of China: reducing the class size,improving teacher quality,setting up a system for protecting rights and interests of unauthorized teachers,promoting the decentralization of administrative power in school.Publication Maternal bargaining power, parental compensation and non-cognitive skills in rural China(2015-11-01) Leight, Jessica; Liu, ElaineThe importance of non-cognitive skills in determining long-term human capital and labor market outcomes is widely acknowledged, but relatively little is known about how non-cognitive skills may shape educational investments by parents early in life. This paper evaluates the parental response to variation in non-cognitive skills among their children in rural Gansu province, China, employing a household fixed effects specification. The results suggest that on average, parents invest no more in terms of educational expenditure in children who have better non-cognitive skills relative to their siblings. However, there is significant heterogeneity with respect to maternal education; less educated mothers appear to reinforce differences in non-cognitive skills between their children, while more educated mothers compensate for these differences. The evidence is consistent with this pattern corresponding to greater bargaining power for more educated mothers and different preferences for compensation among more educated women. In addition, there is evidence that these compensatory investments lead to catch-up in non-cognitive skills over time for children of more educated mothers.