Can Intense Exposure to Hand-Washing and Hygiene Information Campaigns Affect Children's Socio-Emotional Skills? : Evidence from Senegal
Hygiene information and practices play a critical role in preventing diseases, particularly among children. Hygiene behaviors practiced in the household have been linked to development outcomes such as socio-emotional skills. This paper exploits da...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2015
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/11/25247175/can-intense-exposure-hand-washing-hygiene-information-campaigns-affect-childrens-socio-emotional-skills-evidence-senegal http://hdl.handle.net/10986/23433 |
| Summary: | Hygiene information and practices play a
critical role in preventing diseases, particularly among
children. Hygiene behaviors practiced in the household have
been linked to development outcomes such as socio-emotional
skills. This paper exploits data from impact evaluation
surveys of a hygiene information campaign conducted in
Senegal, where the randomized design suffered from
contamination between comparison groups. The variations in
exposure and intensity to hygiene information campaigns
captured in the surveys were used to understand
contamination biases. Such variations were interacted with
the presence of household communication assets to explore
potential effects on children’s socio-emotional scores. In
the presence of contamination biases, the study exploited
the longitudinal sample of children in the surveys to reduce
time-dependent biases. For robustness, statistical matching
was applied between the impact evaluation surveys and
Demographic and Health Surveys conducted in 2008 and 2011.
Socio-emotional outcomes were the imputed into Demographic
and Health surveys to expand sample sizes. By applying
matching techniques and imputing outcomes into a larger
sample, impacts were non-negligible. Double-difference
estimates showed that children’s socio-emotional scores were
higher when intervention status was interacted with the
presence of communication assets within households. Without
the presence of communication assets in the households the
impacts were close to zero. Evaluating the effect of hygiene
campaigns on children’s socio-emotional skills is
challenging because of the biases from contamination that
exist when information flows between comparison groups.
Targeted hygiene information to the poorest households is
relevant for reducing risks of recurrent infections and
enables better conditions for socio-emotional development of children. |
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