Population Council Research that makes a difference

Malawi Schooling and Adolescent Study

This six-round longitudinal study aims to identify critical aspects of school quality that put adolescents who face the dual challenges of poverty and HIV/AIDS on a safer, healthier, and more productive path to adulthood. Our research seeks to uncover those aspects of schooling that will lead to more protective behaviors and lower HIV risk among young men and women.

A decision was reached to eliminate one of the previously planned seven rounds of data collection, and focus instead in 2012 on data cleaning, analysis, and write-up of the five rounds of data collected. Budget cuts over the first five years of the survey, as well as steep increases in fuel prices and uncharacteristic unrest in Malawi which had complicated data collection during Round 5, made this decision advisable. Working with Invest in Knowledge, our implementing partner in Malawi for Rounds 4 and beyond, questionnaires from the first five survey rounds are currently being scanned and the data cleaned. 

We will begin fieldwork for the sixth and final round of data collection in the summer of 2013.  Our objective as in prior rounds will be to measure changes in attitudes, behavior, status, and cognitive skills that may have occurred since the preceding round with regard to: (1) educational attainment and schooling transitions; (2) cognitive skills and ability; (3) mobility and migration;  (4) sexual activity, relationship status, and sexual partners; (5) contraceptive use; (6) marriage and childbearing; (7) sexual and physical coercion and violence; (8) gender attitudes and agency; (9) labor force participation; and (10) living arrangements and household resources.     

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