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.
Search results
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 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 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.Publication Parenting, Education, and Social Mobility in Rural China: Cultivating dragons and phoenixes(2015-10-01) Kong, PeggyLike many countries around the world, China has been implementing policies aimed at improving parent-school relationships. However, unlike many developed countries, the historical context of family-school relationships has been limited and parents typically do not participate in the school context. Until now, there has been little research conducted in rural China on parental involvement in their children’s education. This book investigates the nature of parental involvement in primary children’s education in rural China by using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. It outlines the layered strategies of how rural parents are involved in their children’s schooling, showing that rural parents strongly desire educational success for their children and view education as a means to their children gaining social mobility. It demonstrates that few rural parents engage in visible forms of parental involvement in their children’s schools, such as attending parent-teacher meetings. Rather, they are more likely to engage strategies to support their children’s education which are largely invisible to schools. It adds to the growing body of parental involvement research that suggests that culture, location, and socio-economic status influence different forms of parental involvement, and highlights nuances in invisible forms of parental involvement. Providing insights into how poor rural parents envision their role with their children, schools, and the larger society, and how these relationships can affect the social mobility of students and families, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian education, comparative and international education, and Chinese society.Publication Child labour and academic achievement: Evidence from Gansu Province in China(2015-12-15) He, HuajingThis paper considers the relationship between child labour and a child's academic achievement in rural China. Using a unique longitudinal, multi-level survey, the Gansu Survey of Children and Families (GSCF) which was enrolled in the Gansu province, I use a quasi-maximum likelihood estimation (QMLE) and find that more than 1 h of child labour in the previous time period has a negative effect on a child's academic achievement in the subsequent period after controlling for child talent. I also show that previous academic achievement has no strong significant effect on current child labour by applying a logistic model. Based on the data, the fact that those effects are not very big or not significant suggests that child labour in China is not a big problem when compared with other developing countries (Bacolod & Ranjan 2008).Publication Sibling Rivalry: Ability and Intrahousehold Allocation in Gansu Province, China(2015-03-01) Leight, JessicaThis paper evaluates the strategies employed by households in rural China to allocate educational expenditure to children of different physical endowments, examining whether parents use educational funding to reinforce or compensate for these differences. Climatic shocks are employed as an instrument for endowment, measured as height-for-age, allowing for the identification of the impact of quasi-exogenous variation in endowment on parental allocations conditional on household fixed effects. The results suggest that educational expenditure is directed to the relatively weaker child; in response to the mean differences in height-for-age be- tween siblings, parents redirect around 25% of discretionary educational spending to the child with lower height-for-age, and this effect is robust to the potentially confounding effects of gender and birth order. There is some evidence that time allocation may also be a relevant margin of compensation, but no evidence that medical expenditure responds to differences in height-for-age.Publication The Impact of Early Childhood Rainfall Shocks on the Evolution of Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills(2015-10-01) Leight, Jessica; Glewwe, Paul; Park, AlbertThis paper is the first to estimate the extent to which early childhood climatic shocks affect both cognitive and non-cognitive skills as measured at multiple points in childhood and adolescence. We assess the impact of rainfall observed in utero and during the first two years of life by analyzing a rich longitudinal study of rural youth in a poor province in China. Our empirical strategy entails estimating the impact of rainfall on various measures of cognitive and non-cognitive skills utilizing a reduced form strategy, conditional on county and year-of-birth fixed effects. The results indicate that there is a significant impact of early shocks, particularly shocks in utero and in the first year of life, on cognitive skills, but that this impact may be declining over time. There is little evidence of any impact on non-cognitive skills. We also present evidence that the declining salience of early shocks is consistent with compensatory strategies employed by parents.Publication Ready for school? Impacts of delayed primary school enrollment on children's educational outcomes in rural China(2015-11-01) Chen, QihuiThis paper estimates the causal impacts of delayed primary school enrollment on children's educational outcomes in rural China. Instrumental variable estimates exploiting the discontinuity in children's enrollment age around the enrollment cut-off date indicate that a one-year delay in school enrollment increases the incidence of first-grade retention by approximately 10 percentage points for boys and reduces the probabilities of middle school enrollment by 6 percentage points for both boys and girls. These results suggest that delayed enrollment, even if it may be an optimal choice made by poor parents in response to financial constraints, is likely to be harmful to children's educational development in rural China.