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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
Description
Increasing elementary school attainment globally remains a key focus for improving internationally child development (UNESCO, 2010), and for girls in particular (UNICEF, 2015). This dissertation was designed to test and explore specific areas to target to improve educational attainment for rural indigenous communities using a mixed-methods approach (i.e., quantitative survey of 264 mothers and qualitative interviews with 37 of those mothers 3.5 years later) with a Mayan community in Camanchaj, Guatemala. The first study was designed to examine the educational trajectories available to children in this community (e.g., dropping out, graduating 6th grade) by age, grade, and gender, and identified risks and vulnerabilities for educational attainment. The second study was a logistic regression to examine maternal factors that predict the likelihood of a child graduating from elementary school or dropping out in this community, above and beyond covariates of poverty and health and found that maternal education predicted educational attainment for both boys as girls as well as maternal beliefs about the importance of school for getting a job, which was particularly strong predictor for boys. The third study probed findings from Studies 1 and 2 using Experiential Thematic Analyses and Frequency Analyses to examine processes and cognitions involved in a child’s graduating elementary school, dropping out, and community beliefs and attitudes regarding education and gender equality. Findings highlight the need for interventions that are contextually and culturally appropriate and that consider complex and interacting factors of poverty, health, and gender inequality as well as maternal and community-level attitudes and beliefs to promote elementary school attainment globally.
ContributorsEngland, Dawn Elizabeth (Author) / Martin, Carol L (Thesis advisor) / Cooper, Carey E (Committee member) / Bradley, Robert H (Committee member) / Miller, Cindy F (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Short-term medical missions (STMMs) are groups of volunteer medical providers who travel to provide health care, including basic services and surgeries, to global low-income populations. STMM organizations present their work as contrary to both public and private systems within Guatemala that do not adequately serve the patient population, though they operate within the same framework as other providers and mirror the same neoliberal ideology in their planning, organization and strategy, and execution. STMMs strive to offer free, high-quality access to surgeries and basic health care services via volunteer medical providers willing to dedicate their time and skill to low-income patients. The patient population of STMMs in Guatemala, who are often rural, indigenous, and low-income, already experience diminishing access to health care due to neoliberal health policies and discrimination within the existing health care landscape, going to great lengths to access quality health care services. This research investigates the planning, organization and strategy, and execution of STMMs through the lens of the enduring influence of neoliberal health ideologies on volunteer medical providers and existing health resources in Guatemala. Organizational strategies that prioritize the ease of travel for volunteer medical providers mirror the geographical lack of health care access, neglect of indigenous language services in the health care context, and urban focus already existing in the country’s public health care system. The patient population experiences heightened vulnerability exacerbated by STMMs when seeking care because of their low adherence to Guatemalan law surrounding registration requirements for foreign medical providers and poor institutional accountability, burdening patients, who lack legal literacy and financial resources, with denouncing malpractice or post-operative problems. Finally, STMM providers expect patients to both demonstrate passivity, humility, and material deficiency and show that they can be ‘good’ patients—able to understand and abide by the authority of the medical providers, know what information to provide, and communicate effectively—essentially, to be good health consumers. Ultimately, this research demonstrates how neoliberal health ideologies remain deeply engrained in the psyche of STMM organizations, despite their targeted approach to deliver health care to patients struggling to access services in Guatemala’s chaotic health care landscape.
ContributorsDriese, Mary Catherine (Author) / Maupin, Jonathan N (Thesis advisor) / Hall-Clifford, Rachel (Committee member) / Jehn, Megan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Evolutionary and economic theories of fertility variation argue that novel subsistence opportunities associated with market economies shape reproduction in ways that both increase parental investment per child and lower overall fertility. I use demographic and ethnographic data from Guatemala as a case study to illustrate how ethnic inequalities in accessing market opportunities have shaped demographic variation and the perceptions of parental investments. I then discuss two projects that use secondary data sets to address issues of conceptualizing and operationalizing market opportunities in national and cross-population comparative work. The first argues that social relationships are critical means of accessing market opportunities, and uses Guatemala household stocks of certain forms of relational wealth are associated with greater parental investments in education. The second focuses on a methodological issue in how common measures of wealth in comparative demographic studies conflate economic capacity with market opportunities, and how this conceptual confusion biases our interpretations of the observed links between wealth and fertility over the course of the demographic transition.
ContributorsHackman, Joseph Victor (Author) / Hruschka, Daniel J (Thesis advisor) / Maupin, Jonathan (Committee member) / Hill, Kim (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019