Early child development, child nutrition and growth. Signs and Symptoms
Conditions
Interventions
The intervention will comprise 2 intervention phases:
1. 01/06/2018 - 30/11/2018: Intervention Phase 1
First, communities will randomly be assigned to intervention and
Sponsors
Rural Education Action Program (REAP), Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI), Stanford University
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Inclusion criteria
Inclusion criteria: All children residing in Ningshan County - a randomly selected poor, rural county in Shaanxi Province, China - aged 6 to 36 months at the beginning of the study on 01/06/2018 will be invited to participate in the study together with their main caregivers.
Exclusion criteria
Exclusion criteria: We randomly selected one county from a list of all poor counties in Shaanxi Province. All counties that were not nationally-designated poverty counties were excluded from the list. We refined our sample to nationally-poverty counties because poor, rural areas are known to have larger problems with responsive parenting and child development. We are not excluding any 6- to 36-month-olds living in Ningshan County on June 1, 2018.
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| 1. Child skill development. Early skill development will be measured for all sample infants with the Ages and Stages Questionnaires-3 (ASQ-3) (communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, personal-social), the short forms of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories, and the social-emotional questionnaire of the ASQ. In addition, the cognition, language, motor, and social-emotional scales of the third edition of the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (Bayley-III) and the cognition, language, motor, social-emotion, and mental health scales of the Caregiver-Reported Early Development Instruments (CREDI) long form will be administrated for assessment of early skill development of 1 out of 5 (n=300) of the sample infants. These 300 infants will stratified by treatment status randomly be selected. 2. Child nutrition status will be assessed based on hemoglobin values 3. Child weight and height will be measured to evaluate child physical growth. Skill development and growth will be assessed at baseline (June 2018) and during two rounds of follow-up data collection (December 2018, June 2019). Hemocue fingerprick blood tests will not be administered at baseline, because child nutrition won't be targeted during the first phase of the intervention and we, therefore, don't expect to find an effect on hemoglobin values during the first phase of the intervention. | — |
Secondary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| 1. Service quality (dosage and content) will be monitored using attendance registers. 2. Parental beliefs, knowledge and parenting behavior will be measured. More precisely, we plan to measure beliefs on returns on investments, parental locus of control (with the Parental Locus of Control - Short Form Revised; PLOC-SFR), parental knowledge on ECD (with the Knowledge of Infant Development Inventory-P; KIDI-P), parenting style (with the Parenting Style and Dimensions Questionnaire; PSDQ), and attributes of the home learning environment (with the Family Care Indicators survey; FCI survey). 3. Mental wellbeing of caregivers will be measured with the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS) and the Office of National Statistics (ONS) subjective wellbeing survey. 4. We will measure child temperament using the short forms of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised (IBQ-R) and the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ). 5. Additional information on trainer and household characteristics will be collected using a trainer questionnaire and a household questionnaire, respectively. All secondary outcomes will be measured at baseline (June 2018) and the two rounds of follow-up (December 2018, June 2019). | — |
Countries
China
Contacts
Public ContactYu Bai
Outcome results
None listed