Arranjos familiares e cuidados com o pré-natal e a saúde na primeira infância

Abstract

This thesis aims to evaluate if the family arrangements can affect the healthcare during prenatal and first years of life. We use the data from the 2013 National Health Survey (Pesquisa Nacional de Saúde - PNS), and the Principal Component Analysis to create healthcare indexes. As an empirical strategy to bias reduction we use correspondence estimation, imputation, reweighing and doubly robust estimations, through the propensity scores. The results indicate that, regarding prenatal care, the married women are more likely to adopt the recommended measures than the non-married ones. Additionally, the cohabitant group results are more similar to the single women results than those from the married group. When we implement the control through per capita income quartiles, we observe that the differences between family arrangements remain only for the upper quartile. The results regarding the care quality of children that are at most two years old indicate that, on the households where the responsible adult is married, the children are subject to a better care on average. However, this effect has the opposite sign when we control our sample to only include households with more adults other than those from the main family core. When we run our analysis by income category, the effects are statistically significant only for the higher quartile. We conclude that for the lower levels of income, there is no differences in the healthcare during the prenatal and early childhood for different family arrangements