{"id":769,"date":"2024-03-29T13:17:15","date_gmt":"2024-03-29T13:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/ored\/?p=769"},"modified":"2024-03-29T13:17:16","modified_gmt":"2024-03-29T13:17:16","slug":"elizabeth-heger-boyles-seminar-on-ipums-mics-and-physical-discipline-against-orphans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/ored\/2024\/03\/29\/elizabeth-heger-boyles-seminar-on-ipums-mics-and-physical-discipline-against-orphans\/","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Heger Boyle’s seminar on IPUMS MICS and physical discipline against orphans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Elizabeth Heger Boyle<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sociologist Elizabeth Heger Boyle presented at a recent campus seminar on March 12, 2024.\u00a0 Boyle was invited to give the talk by UM-Flint\u2019s Julie Ma, associate professor of social work. Ma is hosting a series of seminars funded by her recent research grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development known as the Global Families Project<\/a>.\u00a0 The research examines the link between gender inequality and increased violence against children in low and middle income countries.\u00a0 Boyle is a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and discussed the research she and her collaborators are doing on physical discipline and orphans in low to middle income countries.\u00a0 The research uses international data known as IPUMS MICS<\/a>.\u00a0 Boyle collaborates with Ma on the new Global Families project and asked Boyle to present on her related research using the IPUMS MICS system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Anna Bolgrien<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In collaboration with Anna Bolgrien who has a doctorate in philosophy of public affairs, and Mehr Munir who has a masters in humanities and social thought, Boyle is researching whether orphans are disciplined physically more than non-orphans in Sub-Saharan Africa. The team uses the UNICEF standard for defining an orphan, so in the research there are three different types. The types are a maternal orphan, where the child\u2019s mother has passed, a paternal orphan, where the child\u2019s father has passed, and a double orphan, where both parents have passed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mehr Munir<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Most orphans remain in the communities in which they were born, and most live in residences rather than institutions. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest percentage of orphans, and paternal orphans are the most common. Boyle remarked that maternal orphans do have the potential to be missed in the surveys since women are the ones who are asked questions about the children in the household. They found through the research that in Sub-Saharan Africa orphans don\u2019t experience more physical discipline than non-orphans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boyle and her team hypothesized two possible reasons that orphans received less physical discipline than non-orphans. Either the caregivers are acknowledging the orphans are more vulnerable and shouldn\u2019t be punished as harshly, or the caretakers are being inattentive to them and not punishing them as much because they are paying less attention. As such, they focused on two primary goals. The first was finding out whether this data was replicated across regions with more recent data. The second was testing the two competing explanations for what they found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The researchers used the IPUMS MICS program to choose data, and they separated moderate physical discipline, like spanking and hitting on the arm or leg, from violent discipline, like hitting as hard as possible or hitting the head. In order to gauge what is normal for a child in the area and what is not, they created an index on how much individuals engage with children through things like reading, singing, or playing with the child. Boyle stated that if this engagement is positively correlated to orphan discipline, then it would suggest physical discipline is a form of attentiveness. When looking at a bivariate data set, non-orphans experience less violent physical discipline than maternal orphans and double orphans, but about the same as paternal orphans. However, while a bivariate model didn\u2019t suggest a big difference, a multivariate analysis focusing on moderate discipline revealed that, generally, orphans had a lower risk of experiencing physical discipline. There was only one statistically significant region where orphans experienced more physical discipline than non-orphans – paternal orphans in Latin America. This helped provide an answer to the first goal, which confirmed that orphans were less likely to face physical discipline across regions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moving on to the second goal, when looking at the data regarding how often orphans were physically disciplined compared to each other, they found that paternal orphans were physically disciplined more than maternal or double orphans. In addition, when comparing the amount of physical discipline against orphans to the amount of caretaker engagement with the children in the province, there was a positive correlation found between the two, suggesting that a lack of physical discipline is a lack of attentiveness. Boyle stated that while less physical discipline may seem like a positive thing for orphans, it\u2019s not unambiguously positive since it means they are receiving less attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moving forward, Boyle wants to expand study of outcomes for orphans beyond physical discipline, identify protective factors that minimize poor outcomes, and develop policy suggestions consistent with those protective factors. She\u2019s confident that this will be a promising line of research since the factors that predict outcomes for orphans are not the same ones that predict differences between orphans and non-orphans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sociologist Elizabeth Heger Boyle presented at a recent campus seminar on March 12, 2024.\u00a0 Boyle was invited to give the talk by UM-Flint\u2019s Julie Ma, associate professor of social work. Ma is hosting a series of seminars funded by her recent research grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development known as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":572,"featured_media":772,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,8,186,7],"tags":[10,197,195,15,194,18,19,17,196,22,28],"class_list":["post-769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-data-science","category-research-matters","category-societal","category-um-flint-research","tag-collaborative-research","tag-global-families-project","tag-global-health","tag-higher-education","tag-ipums-mics","tag-office-of-research","tag-office-of-research-and-economic-development","tag-ored","tag-physical-discipline","tag-research","tag-um-flint"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/ored\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/ored\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/ored\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/ored\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/572"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/ored\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=769"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/ored\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":773,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/ored\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769\/revisions\/773"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/ored\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/ored\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/ored\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/ored\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}