Network Effects on Rural Education in Afghanistan

252 Pages·2014·4.95 MB·English

by  Matthew Hoover

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It Takes a Village
Network Effects on Rural
Education in Afghanistan
Matthew Amos Hoover
PARDEE RAND GRADUATE SCHOOL
It Takes a Village
Network Effects on Rural
Education in Afghanistan
Matthew Amos Hoover
This document was submitted as a dissertation in March 2014 in
partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree in public
policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. The faculty
committee that supervised and approved the dissertation consisted
of Harold D. Green, Jr. (Chair), Gery W. Ryan, and Dana Burde.
PARDEE RAND GRADUATE SCHOOL
The Pardee RAND Graduate School dissertation series reproduces dissertations that
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To my wife, Dana, without whom this would not be possible.
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Contents
List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiv
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvi
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Afghanistan – A Brief Historical Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2 Development and Education in Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.3 Intervention Evaluation and Effectiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.4 Research and Policy Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2 Background 17
2.1 Conceptual Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.2 Literature Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2.2.1 Environmental Factors in Academic Achievement . . . . . . . . . 23
2.2.2 Network Structure’s Association with Behaviors . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.2.3 Social Cognition – Moving Beyond Network Structure . . . . . . . 43
2.2.4 Harnessing the Power of Network Information for Change . . . . . 57
2.3 Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
2.3.1 Survey Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2.3.2 Household Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2.3.3 Child Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.3.4 Child Achievement Tests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.3.5 Friendship/Playmate Nominations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
2.3.6 Data Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3 Methods 71
3.1 Exponential Random Graph Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
3.1.1 Mathematical Basis of ERGMs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
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3.1.2 Statistics Modeled in ERGMs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
3.1.3 ERGMs: Goodness-of-Fit Statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
3.1.4 Use of ERGM Parameter Estimates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
3.2 Multi-Level Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.3 Analytic Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
3.4 Computational Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
4 Results 89
4.1 Demographic Descriptive Statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
4.2 Network Structure Descriptive Statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
4.3 Exponential Random Graph Model Estimations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
4.3.1 ERGM Goodness-of-Fit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
4.4 Multi-Level Model Estimations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
4.5 Results Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
5 Discussion 131
5.1 Knowledge from Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
5.2 Network Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
5.3 Network Targeting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
5.4 Discussion Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
6 Conclusion 143
6.1 Network Structure and Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
6.2 Cognitive Effects of Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
6.3 Affecting Outcomes – Environment, Structure, and Cognition . . . . . . 151
6.4 How to Use Networks to Strengthen Interventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
A Network Visualizations 157
B Survey Instruments 189
B.1 Household Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
B.2 Head-of-Household Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
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B.3 Child Examination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
B.4 Network Nominations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
B.5 School Monitoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
C Exponential Random Graph Model MCMC Diagnostics 205
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