Sarah E. Levine

Maternal Schooling and Health-Related Language and Literacy Skills in Rural Mexico

This article reports a study on the health-related language and literacy skills of mothers living in a rural Mexican town. Aiming to help fill the gap between research on maternal schooling and health and that on reading and literacy, the researchers apply a particular theory of literacy and schooling to understand the health-related language and literacy skills of mothers living in a rural Mexican town. Overall, the study showed that 1) there was wide variation in performance on all the skills measured; 2) there were significant correlations between oral language skills and reading skills; 3) scores on a decontextualized language task correlated with skills on the health-related listening, reading, and speaking tasks; 4) length of schooling was a significant predictor of the ability to provide decontextualized noun definitions, to understand spoken health messages, and to understand printed health messages, but at all levels of schooling there was wide variation in womens reading abilities; and 5) childhood schooling was not a significant predictor of womens health-interview speaking skills, although the control variable of adult socioeconomic status did not predict this ability. Research involving the relationship between decontextualized language and critical feminist consciousness is suggested.

How Does Schooling Influence Maternal Health Practices? Evidence from Nepal

Women’s schooling is associated with much of the world’s improvement in child survival and maternal and child health since 1960. Evidence for these associations is widely interpreted as representing a causal influence of formal education on health. The relationships of variations in female school attendance at the levels of individuals, populations, and historical periods to reproductive health outcomes raise new questions for comparative educational research concerning the process involved. This article reports the results of a survey designed to test a theoretical model positing that literacy skills acquired by girls in school are retained into their adult years, facilitating their exposure to public health messages in the media, which in turn influence the health knowledge affecting their health behavior as mothers. This survey was conducted in Nepal, a low-income country in which both mass schooling and demographic transition are recent developments, using direct assessment of literacy skills instead of the self-reports or imputation from school attainment levels often used in demographic and health surveys. After a brief review of the relevant studies to provide an empirical basis for