Social science & medicine
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Social science & medicine · Oct 2019
Armed conflict and maternal mortality: A micro-level analysis of sub-Saharan Africa, 1989-2013.
There is existing country-level evidence that countries with more severe armed conflict tend to have higher Maternal Mortality Rates (MMR). However, during armed conflict, the actual fighting is usually confined to a limited area within a country, affecting a subset of the population. Hence, studying the link between country-level armed conflict and MMR may involve ecological fallacies. ⋯ We use a sister fixed-effects analysis to estimate the impact of recent organized violence events within a radius of 50 km of the home of each respondent on the likelihood that her sister dies during pregnancy, childbirth, or the puerperium. Our results show that local exposure to armed conflict events indeed increases the risk of maternal deaths. Exploring potential moderators, we find larger differences in rural areas but also in richer and more educated areas.
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Social science & medicine · Oct 2019
Parent psychology and the decision to delay childhood vaccination.
The study of vaccine hesitancy identifies parental decisions to delay childhood vaccinations as an important public health issue, with consequences for immunization rates, the pursuit of nonmedical exemptions in states, and disease outbreaks. While prior work has explored the demographic and social underpinnings of parental decisions to delay childhood vaccinations, little is known about how the psychological dispositions of parents are associated with this choice. We analyze public opinion data to assess the role of psychological factors in reported parental decisions to delay childhood vaccination. ⋯ Parental decisions to delay childhood vaccinations are an important public health concern that are associated with conspiratorial thinking and needle sensitivity.