Yothin Sawangdee

Community and contraceptive choice in rural Thailand: a case study of Nang Rong.

This paper blends quantitative with qualitative data in an investigation of community and contraceptive choice in Nang Rong, Thailand. Specifically, it develops an explanation of 1) method dominance within villages, coupled with 2) marked differences between villages in the popularity of particular methods. The quantitative analysis demonstrates the importance of village location and placement of family planning services for patterns of contraceptive choice. The qualitative data provide a complementary perspective, emphasizing the importance of social as well as physical space and giving particular attention to the structure of conversational networks.

Land use change: complexity and comparisons

Research on the determinants of land use change and its relationship to vulnerability (broadly defined), biotic diversity and ecosystem services (e.g. Gullison et al. 2007), health (e.g. Patz et al. 2004) and climate change (e.g. van der Werf et al. 2004) has accelerated. Evidence of this increased interest is demonstrated by several examples. Funding agencies in the US (National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and around the world have increased their support of land use science. In addition to research papers in disciplinary journals, there have been numerous edited volumes and special issues of journals recently (e.g. Gutman et al. 2004; Environment & Planning B 2005; Environment & Planning A 2006; Lambin and Geist 2006; Kok, Verburg and Veldkamp 2007). And in 2006, the Journal of Land Use Science was launched. Land use science is now at a crucial juncture in its maturation process. Much has been learned, but the array of factors influencing land use change, the diversity of sites chosen for case studies, and the variety of modeling approaches used by the various case study teams have all combined to make two of the hallmarks of science, generalization and validation, difficult within land use science. This introduction and the four papers in this themed issue grew out of two workshops which were part of a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) ‘Roadmap’ project. The general idea behind the NIH Roadmap initiative was to stimulate scientific advances by bringing together diverse disciplines to tackle a common, multi-disciplinary scientific problem. The specific idea behind our Roadmap project was to bring together seven multi-disciplinary case study teams, working in areas that could be broadly classified as inland frontiers, incorporating social, spatial and biophysical sciences, having temporal depth on both the social and biophysical sides, and having had long-term funding. Early in our Roadmap project, the crucial importance of modeling, particularly agent-based modeling, for the next phase of land-use science became apparent and additional modelers not affiliated with any of the seven case studies were brought into the project. Since agent-based simulations attempt to explicitly capture human behavior and interaction, they were of special interest. At the risk of oversimplification, it is worth briefly reviewing selected key insights in land use science in the past two decades to set the stage for the papers in this themed issue. One of the earliest realizations, and perhaps most fundamental, was accepting the crucial role that humans play in transforming the landscape, and concomitantly the distinction drawn between land cover (which can be seen remotely) and land use (which, in most circumstances, requires in situ observation; e.g. Turner, Meyer and Skole 1994). The complexity of factors influencing land use change became apparent and led to a variety of ‘box and arrow’ diagrams as conceptual frameworks, frequently put together by committees rarely agreeing with one another on all details, but agreeing among themselves that there were many components (social and biophysical) whose role needed to be measured and understood. A series of case studies emerged, recognizing the wide array of variables that needed to be incorporated, and typically doing so by assembling a multidisciplinary team (Liverman, Moran, Rindfuss and Stern 1998; Entwisle and Stern 2005). The disciplinary make-up of the team strongly influenced what was measured and how it was measured (see Rindfuss, Walsh, Turner, Fox and Mishra 2004; Overmars and Verburg 2005), with limited, if any, coordination across case studies (see Moran and Ostrom 2005 for an exception). In large part, the focus on case studies reflected the infancy of theory in land use science. Teams combined their own theoretical knowledge of social, spatial and ecological change with an inductive approach to understanding land use change – starting from a kitchen sink of variables and an in-depth knowledge of the site to generate theory on the interrelationships between variables and the importance of contextual effects. This lack of coordination in methods, documentation and theory made it very difficult to conduct meta-analyses of the driving factors of land use change across all the case studies to identify common patterns and processes (Geist and Lambin 2002; Keys and McConnell 2005). Recognizing that important causative factors were affecting the entire site of a case study (such as a new road which opens an entire area) and that experimentation was not feasible, computational, statistical and spatially explicit modeling emerged as powerful tools to understand the forces of land use change at a host of space–time scales (Veldkamp and Lambin 2001; Parker, Manson, Janssen, Hoffmann, and Deadman 2003; Verburg, Schot, Dijst and Veldkamp 2004). Increasingly, in recognition of the crucial role of humans in land use change, modeling approaches that represent those actors as agents have emerged as an important, and perhaps the dominant, modeling approach at local levels (Matthews, Gilbert, Roach, Polhil and Gotts 2007). In this introductory paper we briefly discuss some of the major themes that emerged in the workshops that brought together scientists from anthropology, botany, demography, developmental studies, ecology, economics, environmental science, geography, history, hydrology, meteorology, remote sensing, geographic information science, resource management, and sociology. A central theme was the need to measure and model behavior and interactions among actors, as well as between actors and the environment. Many early agent-based models focused on representing individuals and households (e.g. Deadman 1999), but the importance of other types of actors (e.g. governmental units at various levels, businesses, and NGOs) was a persistent theme. ‘Complexity’ was a term that peppered the conversation, and it was used with multiple meanings. But the dominant topic to emerge was comparison and generalization: with multiple case studies and agent-based models blooming, how do we compare across them and move towards generalization? We return to the generalization issue at the end of this introductory paper after a brief discussion of the other themes.

Access to health: women's status and utilization of maternal health services in Nepal.

With the objective of reducing maternal and neonatal mortality, the Safe Motherhood Program was implemented in Nepal in 1997. It was launched as a priority programme during the ninth five-year plan period, 1997-2002, with the aim of increasing womens access to health care and raising their status. This paper examines the association of access to health services and womens status with utilization of prenatal, delivery, and postnatal care during the plan period. The 1996 Nepal Family Health Survey and the 2001 Nepal Demographic and Health Survey data were pooled and the likelihood of womens using maternal health care was examined in 2001 in comparison with 1996. Multiple logistic regression analysis indicates that the utilization of maternal health services increased over the period. Programme interventions such as outreach workers visits, radio programmes on maternal health, maternal health information disseminated through various mass media sources and raising womens status through education were able to explain the observed change in utilization. Health worker visits and educational status of women showed a large association, but radio programmes and other mass media information were only partially successful in increasing use of maternal health services. Socioeconomic and demographic variables such as household economic status, number of living children and place of residence showed stronger association with use of maternal health services then did intervention programmes.

Spatial arrangement of social and economic networks among villages in Nang Rong District, Thailand

Abstract This paper examines the spatial arrangement of social and economic networks among villages in Nang Rong district, Thailand. We use spatial information from a geographic information system (GIS) for the district to help interpret the patterns of movement of agricultural equipment (large tractors) between villages, of people into villages for temporary labor, and of people to village temples and to elementary and secondary schools within the district. Once social networks have been incorporated into the GIS they can be mapped in relation to geographic features of the district, such as topography, landcover, and locations of roads, rivers, and villages. Not only does geographic information about village locations allow us to properly orient the graphs of these networks, but the resulting visual displays reveal strikingly different spatial arrangements for the five networks. Networks of shared temples and elementary schools link small sets of villages in close geographic proximity whereas tractor hiring, labor movement, and secondary school networks bring together larger sets of villages and span longer distances. Information on landcover from satellite digital data provides insights into the patterns of network ties throughout the district and shows a clear relationship between tractor hiring networks and type of agricultural activity in the district. The spatial analytic capabilities of the GIS also allow us to assess the impact of the administratively defined district boundary on our measured relations and to evaluate whether rivers and perennial streams create barriers to network ties between villages.

Influence of women's autonomy on infant mortality in Nepal

BackgroundNepalese women lag behind men in many areas, such as educational attainment, participation in decision-making and health service utilization, all of which have an impact on reproductive health outcomes. This paper aims to examine the factors influencing infant mortality, specifically, whether womens autonomy has an impact on infant mortality in the Nepali context.MethodsData were drawn from the Nepal Demographic and Health Survey, 2006. The analysis is confined to 5,545 children who were born within the five years preceding the survey. Association between infant mortality and the explanatory variables was assessed using bivariate analysis. Variables were then re-examined in multivariate analysis to assess the net effect of womens autonomy on infant mortality after controlling for other variables.ResultsThe infant mortality rate (IMR) in the five years preceding the survey was 48 deaths per one thousand live births. Infant mortality rate was high among illiterate women (56 per 1000 live births) and among those not involved in decision making for health care (54 per 1000 live births). Furthermore, infant mortality was high among those women who had more children than their comparison group, who had birth intervals of less than two years, who had multiple births, who were from rural areas, who were poor, whose source of water was the river or unprotected sources, and who did not have a toilet facility in their household.Results from logistic regression show that womens autonomy plays a major role in infant mortality after controlling other variables, such as mothers sociodemographic characteristics, childrens characteristics and other household characteristics. Children from literate women had a 32 percent lower chance (OR = 0.68) of experiencing infant mortality than did children from illiterate women. Furthermore, infants of women who were involved in decision-making regarding their own health care had a 25 percent lower (OR = 0.75) chance of dying than did infants whose mothers who were not involved in healthcare decisions.ConclusionInfant mortality is high in Nepal. In this context, mothers literacy and involvement in healthcare decision making appear to be the most powerful predictors for reducing infant mortality. Hence, in order to reduce infant mortality further, ongoing female education should be sustained and expanded to include all women so that the millennium development goals for the year 2015 can be attained. In addition, programs should focus on increasing womens autonomy so that infant mortality will decrease and the overall well being of the family can be maintained and enhanced.

Continuous and Discrete: Where They Have Met in Nang Rong, Thailand

A major challenge facing the scientific community is to link people to the land so that social behavior can be studied meaningfully in relation to changes in land use and land cover types, landscape conditions, and associated ecosystem processes. One aspect of the challenge is that the linking must take place at appropriate spatial and temporal scales. Another aspect of the challenge is that social data are typically discrete, referring to point locations, whereas data on land cover and land use are typically continuous. In this paper, we examine the linking of people to the land through data transformations that move from the discrete to the continuous and from the continuous to the discrete, with particular reference to our research in Nang Rong, Thailand. We describe approaches used at the village level, which involve setting village territories, use of population distributions models, and integrating social survey data to describe land activities with satellite-based land cover classifications to describe land composition and spatial organization. These approaches are assessed relative to their underlying assumptions, their advantages and disadvantages, and their limitations. We also discuss our experience measuring links at a more micro level, between households and the plots they use. Although our discussion is with reference to a specific setting and site, many of the general points apply to other complex rural environments in which villages consist of clusters of dwelling units surrounded by agricultural lands, and in which households may farm multiple, non-contiguous parcels.

The family building life course and contraceptive use: Nang Rong, Thailand

This paper incorporates the insights of the life course perspective in an examination of the determinants of contraceptive use. It views decision-making about contraceptive methods in the context of personal history and the broader social setting. Three stages in the reproductive life course of married women are considered. In the early years, timing decisions dominate. Contraception is used to delay the first birth and control the tempo of fertility. Mid-career, the major concern is whether to have a sterilizing operation. Towards the end of the fecund period, couples must decide when to stop using contraception, given that they have not already opted for sterilization. We examine choice among nonpermanent methods, as well as sterilization, in the context of a theoretical model that explicitly recognizes the permanence of the sterilization decision. Our statistical procedures control for unobserved community influences. The data are from Nang Rong district, Thailand, a relatively poor area near the Cambodian border under going substantial socioeconomic change during the 1980s. Our results clearly show variation in method choice over the reproductive life course, and variation in the effects of specific determinants including age of husband and wife, living arrangements, and village location. They also demonstrate gains in the understanding of any particular stage in the life course that accrue from an integrated examination of all of them.

Household-Parcel Linkages in Nang Rong, Thailand

An understanding of the dynamic connections between human behavior and the biophysical environment requires that people and land be spatially linked, conceptually and operationally. This paper describes the design and execution of a plan for spatially linking at a fine grain level: households and land parcels in Nang Rong, Thailand. The overall goal was to relate household dynamics to land use. There were several challenges that had to be surmounted: the large number of links to be determined given the sample size; a residential pattern with clustered dwelling units located away from the land farmed); a complex pattern of ownership and use; and the absence of a clear one-to-one relationship between households and parcels (a household using several plots; several households using the same plot). The paper reviews decisions about the design of the data collection, including the decision to start with households and then link to plots, to focus on use rather than ownership, to rely on a village headman informant to collect GPS data on the location of dwelling units, to collect information from households about each plot used and its proximate neighbors, to collect locational information about the plots used by each household from a group interview, and to manually match the last two. The paper describes in detail the options available at each point in the design process, and the reasons for choosing as we did; the map products that were prepared, their cost, and mode of use; the interviewing that took place; problems that arose; and the quality of the links, as far as we are able to evaluate at this point.

A Path Analysis of Mental Health Among Thai Immigrant Employees in Pranakron Si Ayutthaya Province

The aims of this research were to study both direct and indirect path analyses of mental health, and to analyse a causal relationship of each variable. A cross-sectional study used stratified random sampling to select Thai immigrant employees in Pranakron Si Ayutthaya Province, Thailand. General data were analysed by number and percentage. The mental health variable was measured by THMHI-15. The latter was analysed by general statistic, and a path analysis. The results found that job conditions and distance travelled between house and workplace had a direct effect on mental health with a standardised regression weight of 0.581, and −0.443, respectively (p value <0.01). It was found that housing conditions had no effect on mental health. The income variable had a direct influence on mental health with a standardised regression weight of 0.68 (p value <0.01). This research indicated that job conditions were an important factor related to mental health.