Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Queensland, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

Undernourishment is considered the underlying cause for more than one-half of all child deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa. Undernourishment not only increases children’s risk of mortality, but also has negative long lasting health effects including developmental deficits, increased levels of hunger-related and chronic illnesses in adulthood, and adverse pregnancy outcomes for women. Studies analyzing determinants of child undernourishment have shown women’s individual-level educational attainment to be a key predictor of children’s nutritional outcomes, but have fallen short of fully considering community-level socioeconomic characteristics as determinants. Accounting for community-level characteristics points to the role that children’s external household factors and surroundings play in shaping their early-life health and nutrition outcomes. Additionally, substantial health and nutrition variation across urban and rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa raises the need for researchers to not only study how the combination of individual-level and community-level factors affect children’s nutritional outcomes, but also how this relationship differs by urban-rural residential location. Therefore, this dissertation examines the relationship between individual-level and community-levels of women’s educational attainment and urban and rural children’s nutritional outcomes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo using a nationally-representative dataset: the 2007 Democratic Republic of the Congo Demographic and Health Survey. In sum, the findings reveal that: (a) rural Congolese children are more likely to be nutritionally deficient compared to urban Congolese children, yet the highest percentage of nutritionally deficient Congolese children reside in low educated urban communities; (b) whereas urban Congolese communities exhibit substantial variation in child nutritional outcomes by maternal education, rural Congolese communities show little variation in children’s nutritional status; (c) individual-level and community-level women’s education are associated with urban children’s nutritional outcomes, though this association narrows after taking into account women’s socioeconomic status; and (d) individual-level and community-level education are not associated with rural Congolese children’s nutritional outcomes. Overall, the results underscore the importance of a community-context perspective in understanding educational and urban-rural disparities in children’s nutritional outcomes. / text

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Throughout the world, infants and toddlers are spending less time with mothers and more time with peers than ever before, mainly in different kinds of day care. This changing pattern of child care may affect the early development of social competence which is seen as important for social, emotional and intellectual growth. It would therefore be valuable to know in what way different aspects of social competence are influenced by mothers and by peers. The degree of compliance shown by infants and their ability to co-operate in tasks and games have been found to be important indices of social competence. This study observed 48 infants in dyadic interaction, first with their mothers (Situation 1) and then with a familiar peer (Situation 2), as they engaged in a co-operative game. The aim was to assess differences, similarities and possible continuities between the mother-infant and peer systems in children of four age groups (AGs) : AG1 - 37 to 61 weeks7 AG2 - 62 to 86 weekS7 AG3- 87 to 111 weeks7 AG4 - 112 to 136 weeks. Recording was by videotape. Analysis involved the coding of 56 behaviours in three broad areas : mothers' teaching behaviours, children's behaviours with mothers, and peer behaviours. The group was composed of singletons (N=34) and twins (N=14). Singletons were observed over all four age groups, twins over AG1 and AG2 only, and sexes were analysed separately over AG3 and AG4. Behaviours were also compared over both Situations. Reliability was calculated in three ways, giving means of intra- and inter-observer agreement of .92, .82 and .87. Meaningful groups of behaviours were analysed with two-tailed tests of significance. Univariate analysis with multiple independent variables were used for singletons' behaviours over all age groups. Behaviours showing significant differences were analysed for trend and for differences between age groups. Manovas were used for all other comparisons. Correlations were examined between selected behaviours. Differences in mothers' teaching strategies over the age groups were found. Two behaviours which did not show age-related or situation- related differences are discussed, as well as different reactions to these behaviours by mothers and peers. Findings from research with singletons were comfirmed. Differences were found between the behaviours of mothers of singletons and mothers of twins, which suggest that the mothers of twins are not as skilled as mothers of singletons in playing with one child in a dyadic situation. Findings by Savic (1980) are confirmed that twins find the peer situation less stimulating than singletons do, and that twins are more advanced than singletons are in social competence. Sex differences were found suggesting that boys are involved in more active experiences, whereas girls are associated with more passive ones. Analysis of sequences of behaviours suggested that this method was more suitable than analysis of discrete interactions for the observation of complex behaviours such as engagement. It also showed that game-playing did not have the same characteristics in the mother-infant and the peer situations, and comparisons with other research findings are made. No indication was found that the skills taught by mothers were carried over entirely without modification to the peer situation, but other suggestions of possible continuities are discussed. Children's game-playing behaviours were found to be extensions of their own creativity as apparently elicited by experience with peers. The effect on this creativity of the existence and the quality of peer friendships is discussed. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1983.

Phonetic perception becomes native-like by 10 months of age. A potential mechanism of change, distributional learning, affects the perception of 6-8-month-old infants (Maye et al., 2002). However, it was anticipated that perception may be more difficult to change by 10 months of age, after native categories have developed. In fact, some evidence suggests that by this age, the presence of social interaction may be an important element in infants’ phonetic change (Kuhl et al., 2003). The current work advances the hypothesis that infants’ level of attention, which tends to be higher with social interaction, may be a salient factor facilitating phonetic change. Three experiments were designed to test infants’ phonetic plasticity at 10 months, after phonetic categories have formed. A non-social distributional learning paradigm was chosen, and infants’ attention was monitored to probe whether a facilitating role would be revealed. In Experiment 1, 10-month-old English-learning infants heard tokens from along a continuum that is no longer discriminated at this age that formed a distribution suggestive of a category boundary (useful distinction). The results failed to reveal evidence of discrimination, suggesting that the distributional information did not have any effect. A second experiment used slightly different sound tokens, ones that are farther from the typical English pronunciation and are heard less frequently in the language environment. Infants still failed to discriminate the sounds following the learning period. However, a median split revealed that the high attending infants evinced learning. Experiment 3 increased the length of the learning phase to allow all infants to become sufficiently high attending, and revealed phonetic change. Thus, after phonetic categories have formed, attention appears to be important in learning.

The aims of this research were to examine the effects of infant feeding method on sleep development across the first twelve months of life, and to determine whether there are differences in sleep development between infants who are exclusively breastfed and those who are not. The participants were 52 infants and their parents. Parents completed sleep diaries for six consecutive nights once a month, for 12 months starting at one month of age, recording infant and parent sleep-related behaviours. It was predicted that infants who were breastfed for a longer period would have higher instances of night waking, would take longer to achieve the three criteria for sleeping through the night, and would have higher Composite Sleep Scores (Richman, 1981) than their non-breastfed counterparts. There was an unexpected high rate of breastfeeding in the sample of infants across the first 12 months. The breastfed infants displayed less night waking than their mixed or bottle-fed counterparts before three months of age, but more night waking after three months for the remainder of the study. They also took longer to reach each of the three sleeping through the night criteria. However, two subsets appeared within the breastfeeding group - those infants who experienced consolidated sleep earlier than six months of age, and those who did not. This finding demonstrated that breastfed infants are capable of sleeping through the night from an early age, contrary to what previous literature suggests.

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The objectives of this study were: (1) to develop an educational unit on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS); (2) to develop a handout booklet on SIDS from the content material of the educational unit; and (3) to identify a knowledge and attitude change, if any, after the SIDS educational unit was presented.A questionnaire concerning SIDS was developed and mailed to a 12-member expert committee. The committee was represented by the following professions and individuals: five physicians, two registered nurses, three parents, and two public health officials.The questionnaire contained two sections:(a) content statements; and (b) attitude statements. The committee members were asked to react to each of the 32 content and 25 attitude statements by classifying each statement into one of the three categories: essential, desirable, or non-essential. The statements reaching consensus (50 percent of the returned questionnaires) among the committee members as essential were utilized as the basis for the educational unit and evaluation instruments used in this study.The educational unit, along with the achievement and attitude instruments, was presented to the following five groups: (a) a squad of police investigators; (b) a class of emergency medical technicians; (c) a class of licensed practical nurses; (d) a group or parents; and (e) a class of community health students. The students were used as the pilot study group for the educational unit and evaluation instruments. The four remaining groups supplied the data analyzed in this study. A pre-post test design was utilized at each presentation to measure knowledge and attitude changes among the participants. Multiple choice and true-false questions were developed for the achievement test, while a four position attitude scale was utilized for the attitude test.The participants' lack of knowledge concerning SIDS, prior to the presentation of the educational unit, was indicated by the low scores on the pre-achievement test. The post-achievement test indicated all four groups retained better than 85 percent of the presented material. The participants' attitudes revealed a marked improvement from the pre- to post-test. Attitudes between Agree-Strongly Agree were constant on the post-test, in comparison to attitudes of Disagree-Strongly Disagree on the pre-test. An analysis of the evaluation sheets, given to the participants at the end of the SIDS presentation, indicated there were no negative comments regarding the content material, length, or presentation of the SIDS educational unit.This study recommended an educational unit involving SIDS should be implemented in the instructional training of all health professionals who may have contact with SIDS.

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