scholarly journals Sociodemographic determinants of internet use and its impact on family planning behavior among young male in Ethiopia: evidence from EDHS 2016

Author(s):  
Kedir Abdu Yesuf

<p class="abstract"><strong>Background:</strong> Internet was preferred source of health information to retrieve relevant information. The study investigated sociodemographic determinants of internet and its impact on family planning behavior among young male in Ethiopia, 2016.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Methods:</strong> The study was based on data from Ethiopia health and demographic survey 2016. The sample size was 4550 male youth age between 15-24 years include in EDHS 2016. Multilevel logistic regression was used to determine sociodemographic factor associated with internet utilization. The impact of internet use on family planning behaviors was assessed by propensity score matching using average treatment effect.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Results:</strong> The magnitude of internet use in Ethiopia was 14% and factor associated with internet use included age between 20-24 years (AOR=0.60; CI=0.46-0.79), urban resident (AOR=3.94; CI=2.75-5.64), higher educational level (AOR=12.98; CI=2.69-62.66), lived in city administrative region (AOR=2.18; CI=1.46-3.28), respondent own mobile phone (AOR=8.00; CI=95.58-11.48), respondent who able to read whole sentence (AOR=4.04; CI=2.54-6.44) and respondent who has computer in household (AOR=2.03, CI=1.22-3.40) more likely to use internet. In other hand respondent occupation of agricultural and manual has 56% (AOR=0.44; CI=0.3-0.61) and 46% (AOR=54, CI=0.36-0.81) less likely to use internet. The average treatment impact of internet use on exposure to internet about FP, male condom uses and knowledge about FP increase by 12%, 7.2% and 4.5% percent point respectively.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Conclusions:</strong> In spite of fast-growing nature of internet and popularity among youth people. In the future, integrating health information to different platforms on the internet will be a most effective way of health promotion.</p>

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 149
Author(s):  
Mavis Boimah ◽  
Akwasi Mensah-Bonsu ◽  
Yaw Osei-Asare ◽  
Daniel B. Sarpong

Conservation Agriculture (CA) is promoted worldwide on the basis of its contribution to economic, social, and environmental sustainability of agricultural production. In Ghana, despite the increasing interest in the promotion of CA and its practices, its rate of adoption is still low, mainly due to the conflicting evidences regarding its effectiveness. This paper contributes to the numerous debates by examining the impact of CA practices on hired labour, rates of inorganic fertilizers applied by adopters, maize yield, and profit of adopters. Using a cross-sectional data, a multinomial endogenous switching regression (MESR) model was employed to compute the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) and Average Treatment Effect on Treated (ATET) for yield, hired labour, inorganic fertilizer rate, and profit of adopters of CA practices. The study reveals that CA practices impact positively on hired labour employed on the farm, but have a negative impact on profits of adopters. No impact whatsoever of adoption of CA practices is observed on maize yield and also inorganic fertilizer application rates. Technical assistance, and training of farmers on strategies that minimize costs of production must be intensified to raise profits of adopters.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (12) ◽  
pp. 3623-3640
Author(s):  
John A Craycroft ◽  
Jiapeng Huang ◽  
Maiying Kong

Propensity score methods are commonly used in statistical analyses of observational data to reduce the impact of confounding bias in estimations of average treatment effect. While the propensity score is defined as the conditional probability of a subject being in the treatment group given that subject’s covariates, the most precise estimation of average treatment effect results from specifying the propensity score as a function of true confounders and predictors only. This property has been demonstrated via simulation in multiple prior research articles. However, we have seen no theoretical explanation as to why this should be so. This paper provides that theoretical proof. Furthermore, this paper presents a method for performing the necessary variable selection by means of elastic net regression, and then estimating the propensity scores so as to obtain optimal estimates of average treatment effect. The proposed method is compared against two other recently introduced methods, outcome-adaptive lasso and covariate balancing propensity score. Extensive simulation analyses are employed to determine the circumstances under which each method appears most effective. We applied the proposed methods to examine the effect of pre-cardiac surgery coagulation indicator on mortality based on a linked dataset from a retrospective review of 1390 patient medical records at Jewish Hospital (Louisville, KY) with the Society of Thoracic Surgeons database.


2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (12) ◽  
pp. 1669-1682
Author(s):  
Oluwatosin Adejoke Oyedele ◽  
Kemisola O. Adenegan

Purpose African indigenous vegetables have high nutritive value which contains high levels of minerals. The current status of indigenous vegetable production in developing countries shows that these crops are “under-recognized” and “underutilized” with respect to nutritional value and opportunities for food security. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the production of underutilized vegetables on the livelihood of farmers in South Western Nigeria. Design/methodology/approach The population for the study includes all the vegetable farmers in South Western Nigeria with a special focus on farmers’ groups formed by the NICANVEG project in Osun, Oyo, Ondo and Ekiti states. Descriptive statistics and propensity score matching (PSM) was used to analyze the objective. Findings Perceptions on individual household income reveal that the majority of participating respondents perceived higher production and harvesting density. This is due to the fact that harvesting is done by cutting the stems of the vegetables. The probability score shows that the dependent variables have an average effect of 44.6 percent on the probability of farmers participating in NICANVEG project. The PSM results reveal that average treatment effect on the treated is ₦269,254.87. Average treatment on the untreated is ₦11,990.63 while average treatment effect is ₦139,336.43. The total income of the participants from all the various livelihood strategies is increased by 29.73 percent because of their participation in the NICANVEG project. Originality/value This work has not been carried out by any other person before. This work will add to the existing knowledge on the impact of evaluation in agricultural economics.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Ziegler

Participants that complete online surveys and experiments may be inattentive, which can hinder researchers’ ability to draw substantive or causal inferences. As such, many practitioners include multiple factual or informational closed-ended manipulation checks to identify low-attention respondents. However, closed-ended manipulation checks are either correct or incorrect, which allows participants to more easily guess and it reduces the potential variation in attention between respondents. In response to these shortcomings, I develop an automatic and standardized methodology to measure attention that relies on the text that respondents provide in an open-ended manipulation check. There are multiple benefits to this approach. First, it provides a continuous measure of attention, which allows for greater variation between respondents. Second, it reduces the reliance on subjective, paid humans to analyze open-ended responses. Last, I outline how to diagnose the impact of inattentive workers on the overall results, including how to assess the average treatment effect of those respondents that likely received the treatment. I provide easy-to-use software in R to implement these suggestions for open-ended manipulation checks.


Author(s):  
Ibrahim Hussaini Yusuf ◽  
Garba Sakinatu Umar ◽  
Wahab Munir Jamiu

Background: The study examined the impact of a contract farming scheme on the farmers’ income, food security, and nutrition. Methods: Simple random sampling was used to select 100 respondents for the study. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics as well the Propensity Score Matching technique. Results: The major determinants of participation in contract farming included commercialization index, distance from the collection center, and total labor available in the household. The average treatment effect on the treated, the average effect of the treatment, and the average treatment on the untreated shows that contract farming will enhance the income from Maize production by ₦50234.8 ($131.79)/hectare, ₦37170.8 ($97.53)/hectare, and ₦28809.8 ($75.59)/hectare respectively. Conclusion: Contract farming participation can affect farming households negatively if food security concerns are not considered into the contract farming agreements.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 182-208
Author(s):  
Nick Huntington-Klein

AbstractIn Instrumental Variables (IV) estimation, the effect of an instrument on an endogenous variable may vary across the sample. In this case, IV produces a local average treatment effect (LATE), and if monotonicity does not hold, then no effect of interest is identified. In this paper, I calculate the weighted average of treatment effects that is identified under general first-stage effect heterogeneity, which is generally not the average treatment effect among those affected by the instrument. I then describe a simple set of data-driven approaches to modeling variation in the effect of the instrument. These approaches identify a Super-Local Average Treatment Effect (SLATE) that weights treatment effects by the corresponding instrument effect more heavily than LATE. Even when first-stage heterogeneity is poorly modeled, these approaches considerably reduce the impact of small-sample bias compared to standard IV and unbiased weak-instrument IV methods, and can also make results more robust to violations of monotonicity. In application to a published study with a strong instrument, the preferred approach reduces error by about 19% in small (N ≈ 1, 000) subsamples, and by about 13% in larger (N ≈ 33, 000) subsamples.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 22
Author(s):  
Ji Luo ◽  
Daniel J. Henderson

We exploit data from the China Household Finance Survey to examine the impact of changes in the minimum wage on employment and investment decisions. We are able to non-parametrically identify the average treatment effect on the treated via exogenous variation in the minimum wage across provinces. We find that changes in the minimum wage had no adverse effects on employment (in terms of days worked per month or hours worked per work day) but found evidence that changes in the minimum wage impacted the percentage of families that had a bank account, a family in a rural area owned their home, and whether families (whose highest level of education was primary school) planned to purchase a home.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
ZhiMin Xiao ◽  
Steve Higgins ◽  
Adetayo Kasim

Reporting of research data analysis often resorts to numerical summaries, such as effect size estimates in Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs). Summary statistics are helpful and important for evidence synthesis and decision making. However, they can be unstable and inconsistent due to diversity in research designs and variability in analytical specifications. They also mask the dynamics of individual responses to a certain intervention by focusing on average treatment effect on the treated, even though the variation in impact may be crucial information for policy makers. To establish stability and consistency of impact estimates and to reveal the dynamics of individual responses in RCTs, we conduct variable selection, harness the power of noise, implement Cumulative Quantile Analysis (CQA), and devise umbrella plots of loss and gain in this study, using real datasets from over 30 educational interventions funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) in England. For the purpose of comparison, which is essential in data visualisation, all the aforementioned methods are built upon multiple analytical approaches. We show that the importance of an intervention can be ordered through variable selection, and that the power of noise or the bias induced by inappropriate variables, can be utilised to assess the stability of an impact estimate. We also demonstrate that estimates of average treatment effect cannot fully capture the impact of an intervention on sub-groups of participants with varying levels of attainment at baseline, not to mention individual responses to the intervention. Using CQA and umbrella plots, we are able to supplement what common effect size estimates lack in educational interventions. We argue that the impact of an intervention is often more complex than the average treatment effect suggests, and that until a summary is more informative and able to speak directly to the eye, evidence-based policy and practice cannot be fully achieved.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Ziegler

Abstract Participants that complete online surveys and experiments may be inattentive, which can hinder researchers’ ability to draw substantive or causal inferences. As such, many practitioners include multiple factual or instructional closed-ended manipulation checks to identify low-attention respondents. However, closed-ended manipulation checks are either correct or incorrect, which allows participants to more easily guess and it reduces the potential variation in attention between respondents. In response to these shortcomings, I develop an automatic and standardized methodology to measure attention that relies on the text that respondents provide in an open-ended manipulation check. There are multiple benefits to this approach. First, it provides a continuous measure of attention, which allows for greater variation between respondents. Second, it reduces the reliance on subjective, paid humans to analyze open-ended responses. Last, I outline how to diagnose the impact of inattentive workers on the overall results, including how to assess the average treatment effect of those respondents that likely received the treatment. I provide easy-to-use software in R to implement these suggestions for open-ended manipulation checks.


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