This paper assesses the relative contribution of maternal, household, child, and poverty characteristics to the quality of the home environment. The sample consists of 1,887 children birth to 4 years old from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Ordinary least‐squares regression is used to explore conceptually distinct aspects of children's poverty experiences. Poverty variables are found to have a statistically significant effect on the quality of the home environment, after controlling for the effects of other variables in the models. Statistically significant interactions among poverty variables are identified. A major finding is that improvements in family income have the strongest effects on the quality of the home environment for children who were born poor or lived much of their lives in poverty. The conclusion emphasizes implications for future research.

This paper assesses the relative contribution of maternal, household, child, and poverty characteristics to the quality of the home environment. The sample consists of 1,887 children birth to 4 years old from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Ordinary least-squares regression is used to explore conceptually distinct aspects of children's poverty experiences. Poverty variables are found to have a statistically significant effect on the quality of the home environment, after controlling for the effects of other variables in the models. Statistically significant interactions among poverty variables are identified. A major finding is that improvements in family income have the strongest effects on the quality of the home environment for children who were born poor or lived much of their lives in poverty. The conclusion emphasizes implications for future research.

In the analysis of survival data using the Cox proportional hazard (PH) model, it is important to verify that the explanatory variables analysed satisfy the proportional hazard assumption of the model. This paper presents results of a simulation study that compares five test statistics to check the proportional hazard assumption of Cox's model. The test statistics were evaluated under proportional hazards and the following types of departures from the proportional hazard assumption: increasing relative hazards; decreasing relative hazards; crossing hazards; diverging hazards, and non-monotonic hazards. The test statistics compared include those based on partitioning of failure time and those that do not require partitioning of failure time. The simulation results demonstrate that the time-dependent covariate test, the weighted residuals score test and the linear correlation test have equally good power for detection of non-proportionality in the varieties of non-proportional hazards studied. Using illustrative data from the literature, these test statistics performed similarly.

No abstract

Study objectives-The main aim of the study was to discover if a midwife home visiting programme has a significant effect on the prevalence of health problems and breast feeding behaviour of mothers who delivered normally and their healthy fullterm newborn babies, during a period of 42 days after delivery. Another aim was to compare the mothers', the midwife's, and the doctor's findings of prevalence of health problems at the end of the puerperium period. Design-A randomised controlled trial was carried out. One group of mothers and their infants were randomly allocated to a home visiting group (Group A); the other group (Group B) was only visited at day 42. Setting-The study was carried out at the University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia. Participants-A total of 408 mothers who had a normal delivery and gave birth to a healthy fullterm infant, as assessed by the attending midwife, were randomised to two groups. Group A consisted of 208 mother/infant dyads who were visited by a midwife in their homes at days 3, 7, 28, and 42 after delivery and Group B consisted of 200 mother/infant dyads who were only visited at day 42. Main results-At day 42 an equal proportion (30%) of mothers in both groups perceived that they had health problems. The prevalence of infant health problems in Group B was significantly higher (p<0.01) as perceived by mothers. There were more mothers in Group B (p<0.01) perceiving insuYcient milk production and giving supplementary feeding. At day 42, mothers in Group A (56%) took more actions than mothers in Group B (41%) to solve infant health problems ( p<0.03). In both groups the mothers' perceived own health problems, were significantly higher (p<0.01) than those observed by the obstetrician and those observed by the midwife. The midwife found more infant health problems in Group B (p< 0.01) than in Group A and more infants with health problems in both groups compared with the paediatrician's findings (p<0.01). Conclusions-There was a significant difference between the mothers' reported health problems and the health problems identified by the midwife and the doctors. The study shows that a midwife home visit and individual health education to mothers, reduce the prevalence of infant health problems, and enables the mother to more often take action when an infant health problem is identified. There is a need to re-evaluate the midwifery training curriculums with the intention to include more infant management care. (J Epidemiol Community Health 1998;52:385-391) The concept of high risk pregnancy has been extensively discussed in recent years 1 and programmes have been suggested to improve the coverage, content and quality of health service and support for the childbearing women. 2-5Less attention has been paid to describing the health and social situation of women as well as their concerns during the postpartum period. Information is limited on mother's self perceived health problems and self care actions for herself and her newborn child and the cor...