Robert A. Levine, Sarah E. Levine, Beatrice Schnell-Anzola, Meredith L. Rowe, and Emily Dexter
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195309829
- eISBN:
- 9780199932733
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195309829.003.0021
- Subject:
- Psychology, Developmental Psychology
This chapter provides an overview of the community-level field research on maternal literacy carried out in four countries: Mexico, Nepal, Venezuela and Zambia. It begins with the ways in which ...
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This chapter provides an overview of the community-level field research on maternal literacy carried out in four countries: Mexico, Nepal, Venezuela and Zambia. It begins with the ways in which fieldwork was conducted and how it changed. The socioeconomic, institutional and demographic trends and local contexts affecting women in those communities are described, for the period when they were school-aged children and years later when they were mothers. The social characteristics of the samples are reported. There is also a description of the contexts of mothers in the UNICEF Nepal Literacy and Health Survey carried out after the four-country study. The substantial variation between communities in urbanization, income, average level of women’s education and mortality and fertility levels, even though demographic transition was under way in all the field sites, suggest that they represent drastically differing environments in which to test hypotheses about the effects of schooling.Less
This chapter provides an overview of the community-level field research on maternal literacy carried out in four countries: Mexico, Nepal, Venezuela and Zambia. It begins with the ways in which fieldwork was conducted and how it changed. The socioeconomic, institutional and demographic trends and local contexts affecting women in those communities are described, for the period when they were school-aged children and years later when they were mothers. The social characteristics of the samples are reported. There is also a description of the contexts of mothers in the UNICEF Nepal Literacy and Health Survey carried out after the four-country study. The substantial variation between communities in urbanization, income, average level of women’s education and mortality and fertility levels, even though demographic transition was under way in all the field sites, suggest that they represent drastically differing environments in which to test hypotheses about the effects of schooling.