Poster #81 - Effects of Urbanization on Child Development in Bhutan

• In Event: Poster Session 10

Abstract

Today, 57% of the world population resides in the urban areas (World Bank, 2018). As the urban settings become the places where more children grow up, the role of urban context in child development gains more significance (UNICEF, 2018). Despite the crucial role of urban environments on values attributed to children and parenting practices (Kağitçibaşi, 2007), very limited attention has been directed towards how urbanization impacts child development. The aim of this pre-registration study is to investigate how urban context affects cognitive development in a rapidly urbanizing society, Bhutan. The sample consisted of 504 children who were 3 to 5-years-old. Cognitive development was measured by using a non-verbal intelligence test, SON-R 2-8 (Tellegen et al., 2018). There are two main variables of interest: urbanization and poverty. The migration history of the family (i.e., when and where they moved in the last ten years) is used to calculate two urbanization-related variables: urban exposure and change in urbanicity across years. Urban exposure is the extent to which the family and/or children are exposed to urban environment. It will be measured by calculating the area under the curve demonstrating the relationship between changing level of urbanicity in the places where the family lived (i.e., y-axis) across years (i.e., x-axis). Change in urbanization will be measured by extracting the beta coefficient from the regression line fitting to the same curve. Poverty is measured by calculating the household income divided by total number of household members. Parents/caregivers’ perception of their financial status (Centre for Bhutan Studies and GNH Research, 2014) is also used to assess poverty. For the statistical analysis, a series of general linear models will be performed. First model will include the variables of urbanization, poverty, age and gender as factors (covariates) on cognitive development. In this model, urbanization variable will be based on the migration history of the parents (i.e., last ten years). Second model will be run with the same variables but this time urbanization measure will depend on the migration history of children (i.e., the child’s birth year- 2022). The comparison of explained variance in the first two models will be informative about whether it is the parents’ or the child’s urban experience that is more critical for developmental outcomes. While parents and/or their spouses who are civil servants in Bhutan are excluded from the sample of the first two models, the third model will be tested on the sample consisting of civil servants only. This model is expected to function as a control group where the effects of urbanization will be nullified because civil servants in Bhutan maintain their social and economic benefits provided by the government regardless of where they reside. Fourth model will be run on 10 000 permutation samples of non-civil servant group (i.e., Monte Carlo method) equal in the size of the civil servant group. The purpose is to show that the predicted null effect in the civil servant group is not due to a lower sample size and/or lack of power.

Authors

• Umay Sen, Uppsala universitet
  Presenting Author

• Nidup Dorji, Khesar Gyalpo University of Medical Sciences of Bhutan

• Pär Nyström, Uppsala universitet

• Wangchuk Wangchuk, Khesar Gyalpo University of Medical Sciences of Bhutan,

• Gustaf Gredebäck, Uppsala universitet