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Informing Mothers about the Benefits of Conversing with Infants: Experimental Evidence from Ghana / Pascaline Dupas, Camille Falezan, Seema Jayachandran, Mark P. Walsh.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Dupas, Pascaline.
- Series:
- Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w31264.
- NBER working paper series no. w31264
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
- Place of Publication:
- Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2023.
- Summary:
- Despite the well-established importance of verbal engagement for infant language and cognitive development, many parents in low-income contexts do not converse with their infants regularly. We report on a randomized field experiment evaluating a low-cost intervention that aims to raise verbal engagement with infants by showing recent or expectant mothers a 3-minute informational video and giving them a themed wall calendar. Six to eight months later, mothers selected for the intervention report greater belief in the benefits of verbally engaging with infants, more frequent parent-infant conversations, and that their infants have more advanced language and cognitive skills. We measure positive but noisy effects on parental verbal inputs in a day-long recording and on surveyor-observed infant cognitive skills. The intervention could be delivered to expectant mothers through existing health clinics at very low marginal cost so could be a highly cost-effective early childhood development policy in low-income contexts.
- Notes:
- Print version record
- May 2023.
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