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PARENTAL AND SIBLING MIGRATION AND HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE AMONG RURAL CHILDREN IN CHINA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2015

MING WEN  and
KELIN LI
MING WEN*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA
KELIN LI
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, California State University-Dominguez Hills, Carson, USA
*
1Corresponding author. Email: ming.wen@soc.utah.edu
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Summary

This study examines the associations between parental and sibling rural-to-urban migration and blood pressure (BP) of rural left-behind children (LBC) in rural China. Analysis was based on the 2000, 2004, 2006 and 2009 waves of longitudinal data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, which is an ongoing prospective survey covering nine provinces with an individual-level response rate of 88%. Blood pressure levels were measured by trained examiners at three consecutive times on the same visit and the means of three measurements were used as the final BP values. An ordinal BP measure was then created using a recently validated age–sex-specified distribution for Chinese children and adolescents, distinguishing normal BP, pre-hypertension and hypertension. Random effect modelling was performed. Different migration circumstances play different roles in LBC's BP with mother-only and both-parent migration being particularly detrimental and father-only and sibling-only migration either having no association or a negative association with LBC's BP levels or odds of high BP. In conclusion, the link between family migration and left-behind children's blood pressure is complex, and depends on who is the person out-migrating.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Biosocial Science , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 129 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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