Effects of Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Women's Status on Women's Health in Cameroon

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Citation: Defo, K. (1997) Effects of Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Women's Status on Women's Health in Cameroon. Social Science and Medicine (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Effects of Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Women's Status on Women's Health in Cameroon
Tagged: uw-madison (RSS), wisconsin (RSS), sociology (RSS), demography (RSS), prelim (RSS), qual (RSS), WisconsinDemographyPrelimAugust2009 (RSS)

Summary

Research on the effects of socioeconomic disadvantage and women's status on women's health is important for policy makers in developing countries, where limited resources make it crucial to use existing maternal and child health care resources to the best advantage. Using a 2-year (1978-1981) longitudinal community-based data set collected prospectively in Cameroon, this study attempts to understand the extent to which socioeconomic factors and women's status have influences on women's health. Kuate Defo uses a theoretical framework somewhat similar to that of Mosley and Chen (1984) where socioeconomic factors at the individual, household, and community-levels affect women's obstetric history, access to and utilization of health care services, reproductive patterns, and nutritional behavior and status, which are all related to one another. These health factors then affect and are affected by women's morbidity, which, in turn, affects their mortality. In the statistical modeling, Kuate Defo focuses on women's health histories (episodes of illnesses) over a 2-year period after childbirth, using even history analysis. Estimated parameters measure direct and indirect effects of socioeconomic factors and women's status on women's transition from good health to ill health. Kuate Defo finds that, in general, women are not only ill at or around childbirth, but continue to have health problems well beyond the periods around childbirth and the puerperium. Infectious and parasitic diseases (notably malaria), complications of pregnancy and childbirth, respiratory infections, digestive diseases and nutritional deficiencies are the most important causes of maternal ill health throughout the 1st 2 years postpartum. The most important finding is that the burden of illness rests disproportionately on the economically disadvantaged women and on those with low social status. The long-term effects of social disadvantage are apparent in the excesses of morbidity among women who are not employed at the time of their children's birth, women living in poor neighborhoods, and those living in households without modern amenities. The maternal morbidity patterns during the postpartum period indicate that the women's reports of their recovery and health status from childbirth extend far beyond the first few weeks that previous studies have focused on. From a theoretical perspective, this study has demonstrated the importance of the "intermediate" framework for the study of women's health: the operations of effects of a number of background characteristics are mediated by more proximate determinants of women's health. For example, the effects of background characteristics, such as, women's education, marital status, and ethnicity, were mediated by more proximate determinants of women's health, such as, maternal age and parity. These results remain robust even after controlling for other measured factors and after correcting for unmeasured heterogeneity and sample selection; this helps to dismiss the potential influence of some artifacts.