Village and Region as Contexts for Health and Demographic Outcomes

Reeve Vanneman, University of Maryland
Manjistha Banerji, University of Maryland
Esha Chatterjee, University of Maryland
Kriti Vikram, University of Maryland

“Context” has almost always been defined by local communities: urban neighborhoods and rural villages. While important, this design ignores the larger regions into which local communities are organized. We propose an analysis of health and demographic outcomes from the Indian Human Development Survey 2005 that simultaneously analyzes both village- and district-level contexts. Comparable village and district data from the Indian Census measure five education and labor force characteristics frequently related to health and demographic outcomes. We propose to study a broad array of outcomes to capture the expected variety of community and regional relationships.