The Role of Community Context in Children's Health: Evidence from the Philippines

Marie Joy B. Arguillas, Cornell University

Over the last decade, there is accumulating evidence that the social environment at the community level exerts significant influence on the various behavioral and health outcomes of people living in them. Using multilevel models to separate out the variations in health outcomes that may be due to area-level factors from that of the characteristics of individuals and families, an increasing number of investigations using cross-sectional data show that independent of individual and family characteristics, where one lives matters. My research extends the work in this body of scholarship by using a longitudinal data to investigate the effects of the community socio-economic context on the survivorship and health of Filipino children. Aside from having the potential of establishing the social, behavioral and biological causal pathways between community context and health outcome, using longitudinal data allows for the examination of how changes in the community context affects health.