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" The link between migration and health: A longitudinal analysis of Indonesian data "
Yao Lu
D. J. Treiman
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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52485
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| Doc. No
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TL22439
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| Call number
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3322084
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| Main Entry
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Yao Lu
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| Title & Author
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The link between migration and health: A longitudinal analysis of Indonesian data\ Yao Lu
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| College
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University of California, Los Angeles
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| Date
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2008
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| student score
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2008
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| Page No
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174-n/a
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| Abstract
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This project examines the link between two complex population processes, migration and health, in a developing setting, Indonesia. I assess the conjecture that health can influence the likelihood of migration, and migration can affect the health of not only those who move but of those who are left behind in sending regions. I offer a comprehensive and systematic analytical framework for understanding the relationship, and incorporate individuals in sending communities as a vital component in understanding all the research questions. This research exploits longitudinal data and conceptualizes migration and health as dynamic processes to strengthen causal claims. To unveil the complexity of the relationship, I study measures reflecting multiple dimensions of health (physical as well as psychological), and explicitly evaluate proximate socioeconomic and behavioral mechanisms. Specifically, I first assess the long-standing but little examined "healthy migrant" hypothesis--whether migrants are largely drawn from healthy individuals--by comparing pre-migration health status of those from the sending population who do and do not move. I find support for the health selection hypothesis. But the strength and direction of the selection vary by different types of migration and distinctive dimensions of health. I next examine how the migration experience affects health outcomes of migrants. I address the possible selection of migrants and contrast migrants with the appropriate counterfactual, by modeling the change in health of young rural-urban labor migrants prior to and after migration and contrasting it with the corresponding change for non-migrants who remain in rural regions, under the fixed-effect framework. I find that overall in the short run, rural-to-urban labor migration has very little impact on physical health, but has a detrimental effect on psychological health as measured by depression symptoms, largely due to family separation. The effect on physical health in part speaks to the physiological resilience of young labor migrants to various life stressors. Pathway analysis, which demonstrates various offsetting influences of migration, further explains the lack of an overall effect. It turns out that labor migration improves economic conditions, household hygiene, and health care opportunities, but also creates information barriers and work stressors. Importantly, improved economic conditions do not seem to translate into better health, because migrants often curtail their spending in order to send back a large amount of remittances. Finally, I relate migration to the health of the left-behind population to study whether the effect of migration extends to the sending communities and to social well-being such as health, again using the fixed-effect method to adjust for possible selection. Results point to both the costs and benefits of labor out-migration. Adults in households with labor migrants enjoy better nutritional status than their counterparts in households without labor migrants, but they are also more susceptible to stress-related health impairments such as hypertension and also are more vulnerable to psychological ailments such as depression. The detrimental effect due to increased stress is largely borne by males as a result of their traditional gender roles, whereas the disruptive effect on psychological health mostly applies to females. I also find that older adults are especially sensitive to health risks, which lends support to the physiological resilience of young adults. Pathway analysis tells a coherent story by illustrating the importance of migration, both as a means of enhancing household living standards through remittances, and in terms of loss of local support and labor that leads to excessive stress and emotional burden.
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| Subject
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Social sciences; Demography; Population health; Sociology of health; Developing countries; Migration; Asia; Health; Indonesia; Public health; Data analysis; 0938:Demography
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D. J. Treiman
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University of California, Los Angeles
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