Big study looks at impact of child poverty in Peru, India, Vietnam and Ethiopia

The Young Lives Project is a unique, long term study of childhood in 4 countries - Peru, Vietnam, India and Ethiopia.  It is exploring the impact of poverty on children's development, and identifying the most effective policy interventions that could enable poor children to reach their full potential. In this podcast, Amanda Barnes talks to Alan Sanchez, Principal Investigator in the Young Lives Project which is based at Oxford University, about the research he has been doing on child development in Peru. She started by asking him to explain the Young Lives study and what it is trying to achieve. Alan Sanchez:  The Young Lives study  is an international longitudinal study of childhood poverty.  We started in 2002 and the intention is to track the livelihood of families for basically 15 years.  And we are working in four different countries: in Peru, in Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Andhra Pradesh in India. The study is led by Oxford University and has research partners in each of the countries. We use a variety of methods: quantitative methods and also qualitative methods. The main objective is to have a better understanding of the causes and consequences of childhood poverty. Amanda Barnes: So how many children altogether are included in the study? AS: In total, twelve thousand.  And then we have eight thousand kids that we have been tracking since they were aged between one and two years old ( in the year 2002). We call them the younger cohort.  And then there are another four thousand kids that we are tracking, also since 2002, and they were between seven and eight years old the year when we started with the survey. So by now they are 18 years old. AB: That’s a lot of kids. So generally, a sample of that kind of size: is that something that’s statistically representative of the population as a whole more or less? AS:  Well, we do not intend to be nationally representative.  We want our samples to be very informative of each of the countries and to observe children growing up in communities with a variety of living standards and variation in terms of geographical location and ethnic groups. So that even though our intention was not to claim national representativeness, we can certainly say many things about the characteristics in which these children are growing up in each of the countries. AB: Why were those particular countries chosen? AS: One important thing was to have diversity. So even within each country we were looking to have diversity in terms of the communities in our sample.  But it was also important to have diversity in terms of the countries that we selected.  So on the one hand we were looking for regularities. So we wanted to be able to say whether certain processes are very similar regardless of the country, which we have found.  But at the same time some policies are very country-specific and if you only focus on one country then it means you are only able to say things about that specific country and the specific policies that take place in that place. But if you have other countries it means you observe a variety of social policies and see their effects on children. AB:  Yeah, well that makes pretty good sense. AB: So your research, some of it looked at what the data could tell you about what factors in early childhood had an impact on outcomes for them at later stages – even up to their mid-teens.  Can you tell us what specifically your study was trying to find out? AS: Yes, well to let you know a bit more about the background.  This study is based on two studies that I did previously.  In one of the studies, using data for Peru for instance, we found that there was a food price crisis a few years ago and we were able to measure that this crisis had consequences on the early nutrition of those kids that were very young at the time that the crisis took place.  But not only that, also that these kids later on had a lower cognitive development because of this crisis.