SUMMARY

Family formation events like sex, marriage, contraception, and pregnancy/childbirth during the transition to adulthood have strong consequences for an individual’s own health and well-being as well as for family members. Intergenerational influences of parents on children strongly predict children’s family formation during the transition to adulthood, but the role of highly prevalent mental disorders among parents has never been examined. Our investigation will yield a highly significant advance in the science of intergenerational influences on family formation as well as crucial new information about the potential for treatment of parental mental disorders to improve the life courses of their children.

OBJECTIVES

1. Estimate the effects of parental mental disorders, particularly depression, anxiety disorder, and alcohol use disorders in shaping their children’s subsequent marriage, contraception, and childbearing.
2. Re-estimate the effect of the paternal mental disorder in children’s subsequent marriage, contraception, pregnancy, and risky behavior controlling for children’s mental disorders.
3. Estimate the independent effect of the father’s and mother’s mental disorders in children’s subsequent family formation transitions – marriage, contraception, and childbearing.

METHODOLOGY

Study Population: 4,100 individuals aged 15-24 from 4000 households within 151 CVFS sample neighborhoods. CVFS is a prospective panel study with over 25 years of representative samples of the study area that was launched in 1995 using a stratified cluster sample design.

Data Collection Tool: Three survey questionnaires are administrated viz., I) Baseline survey, II) Follow-up survey, and III) Prospective household demographic registration system programmed using Blaise 5 web survey software. Prospective household demographic registration is administered to all CVFS sample households and members of those households aged between 15-24 years are included in both the baseline and follow-up individual interviews.

Data Collection Technique: The interviews follow a mixed-mode survey design where web surveys of sensitive topics, and frequent repeated measures are taken by web/phone surveys. Internet contact is supplemented with phone and face-to-face contact to remind respondents to complete the survey and phone interviews when they do not have web access. Each survey will be less than 15 minutes of questions with a mix of content, beginning with updates on sexual partnerships and adding screening items for recent episodes of substance use and mental disorders.

Pilot Study: 200 current and former residents of Chitwan aged 15-24 who are not the participants in CVFS are interviewed via web or telephone for a 15-minute-long baseline survey followed by a follow-up survey of 5 minutes taken about two months apart.

OUTCOME

Data

Data will be available upon completion.

Publications

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