Mana Akrapandit. The impact of fertility on child educational attainment : a longitudinal study of a rural area in Thailand . Doctoral Degree(Demography). Mahidol University. : Mahidol University, 2003.
The impact of fertility on child educational attainment : a longitudinal study of a rural area in Thailand
Abstract:
The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of fertility on child
educational attainment. Fertility was measured by the number of children born to the
child’s mother. Child educational attainment was measured by the number of years of
schooling which the child had completed by 1994. The hypothesis of this study was
that fertility has an inverse association with child educational attainment. Multiple
regression and longitudinal data of Nang Rong 1984 and 1994 were employed for the
data analysis. The unit of analysis was children who were 7 – 13 years old in 1984.
There were 5,438 cases in this study.
Child education attainment was the dependent variable, while independent
variable was children ever born. They were 11 control variables in 4 domains: 1) child
characteristics (age and gender), 2) family context (family production resources, sizes
of production activities, family activities to earn extra income, child dependency ratio,
mother’s education, and family type, 3) accessibility to school (distance from village
to secondary school), and 4) community factor (living location and ethnicity).
The results revealed that in rural areas of the northeast, fertility had an inverse
association with child educational attainment. However, fertility could explain child
educational attainment very little. The socioeconomic context variables of the
children played a more important role on child education than fertility did.
Regarding the control variables, boys and children who were younger had
higher educational attainment than girls and children who were older. In addition, the
children who resided in a family that possessed more production resources, had a
lower child dependency ratio, and where the mother had completed grade 4 or higher
had higher educational attainment than those who possessed less production
resources, had a higher child dependency ratio, and where the mother had completed
less than grade 4. Interestingly, the children who resided in villages where the major
dialect was Lao had lower education than those who were in Thai Korat villages. The
results of the study support the government policy in family planning