Nutrition, health and development during the first three years of life are at the foundation of human capital formation. Yet children growing up in poverty often experience low levels of stimulation and low quality of nutrition. Interventions that promote child stimulation and emphasize parent-child interactions providing opportunities to play and learn such as home visits and community groups have been identified as having great potential but there is little evidence of cost-effective interventions that can be implemented at scale in very poor environments. This study in India will develop evidence on the relative effectiveness of using home visits and group visits to help caregivers, usually mothers, support their children’s healthy development.
his study covers the following topics:
Anthropometry Module: includes questions about the weight and height of the biological mother and the target child.
Biological Mother Module: includes questions about family members, use of time for various daily activities, social networks, who takes various decisions in the family, children, pregnancy, and use of contraception, and mental health and well-being over the past week.
Household Roster Module: includes questions about each member of the household, as well as a follow-up on household members from last year and the addition of new household members.
Household Environment Module: includes questions about daily care, emotional and verbal responsivity based on infant-toddler home observation for the measurement of the environment, punishment, rewards, stimulation, and play materials.
Household Module: includes questions about the work that some members of the household have been doing, the work that the father and mother of the target child have been doing, characteristics of the dwelling, water use and sanitation in the house, prices expected to be paid for some goods and services, savings in the household, debts and loans, expenses incurred in the household, and things which happened in the last year which affected the household.
Primary Caregiver Module: includes questions about family, education, work, use of time for various daily activities, beliefs about general practices of child feeding, social networks, who takes various decisions in the family, and mental well-being over the past week.
Social Networks Module: includes questions about social networks.
Target Child Module: includes questions about the interaction of the child with the mother and father, child birth and feeding practices, child stool and its disposal practices, immunisation of the child, child weight measurement, diarrhea and its remedial practices, common diseases, the childcare institution which the child attends or will attend in the future, and expectations about the child's education.
Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development Module: used to measure children's cognitive, language, and motor development.
