The Moderating Role of Caregiver Mental Health in Parenting Interventions in Rural China

Speaker: Qi Jiang, Doctoral Candidate in Health Policy at University of California, Berkeley

Caregiver mental health plays a crucial role in early childhood development (ECD) and may influence the effectiveness of parenting stimulation interventions. This study examines how caregiver mental health moderates intervention compliance, child development outcomes, and responsive stimulation in LMICs. Using data from a cluster-randomized controlled trial in 100 rural villages in China, including 2,040 caregiver-child dyads, we found caregiver depressive symptoms significantly moderated treatment effects on child cognitive development, caregiver-child interactions, and caregiver stress symptoms. In contrast, caregiver anxiety symptoms did not show significant moderating effects. These results suggest that integrating mental health support into parenting programs can enhance the impact of interventions, even when mental health is not the primary focus. This study provides key policy insights for improving ECD outcomes through targeted mental health support in LMICs.

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer emerging China scholars an opportunity to engage directly with interdisciplinary faculty and peers from across campus to discuss and receive feedback on their research. Each workshop features one or several PhD students presenting their latest empirical findings on issues related to China’s economy. Past topics have included college major selection as an obstacle to socioeconomic mobility, the effect of a cooling-off period on marriage outcomes, and factors contributing to government corruption. Faculty and senior scholars provide comments and feedback for improvement. This event series helps to build and strengthen Stanford’s community of young researchers working on China.

Workshops are held on select Fridays from 12 - 1 pm. Lunch will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Join us for a lightning round edition of the SCCEI Young Researcher Workshop series. Each presenter will have 30 minutes to share their research and field audience questions.

Round 1: China’s Two-Child Policy and Gender Wage Gap

Presenter:  Ni Yan, PhD Candidate in Economics, Stanford University

Round 2: Governance Structure and Cropland Protection

Presenter: Ru Yan, PhD Candidate in Agricultural Economics, Zhejiang University 

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer emerging China scholars an opportunity to engage directly with interdisciplinary faculty and peers from across campus to discuss and receive feedback on their research. Each workshop features one or several PhD students presenting their latest empirical findings on issues related to China’s economy. Past topics have included college major selection as an obstacle to socioeconomic mobility, the effect of a cooling-off period on marriage outcomes, and factors contributing to government corruption. Faculty and senior scholars provide comments and feedback for improvement. This event series helps to build and strengthen Stanford’s community of young researchers working on China.

Workshops are held on select Fridays starting at 12 pm. Lunch will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Join us for our first ever lightning round edition of the SCCEI Young Researcher Workshop series. Each presenter will have 30 minutes to share their research and field audience questions.

Round 1: The Impact of Ownership on Lending: Local Government and Regional Banks in China

Presenter:  Wei Wei, Lazear-Liang Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Round 2: Corporate Governance of Chinese SOEs: An Extra-legality Perspective

Presenter: Tian Xie, Doctor of the Science of Law (JSD) Candidate, Stanford Law School

Round 3: Son-Preference, Fertility Policy Relaxation, and Mothers’ Well-being

Presenter: Hanmo Yang, Lazear-Liang Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford Graduate School of Business
 

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer emerging China scholars an opportunity to engage directly with interdisciplinary faculty and peers from across campus to discuss and receive feedback on their research. Each workshop features one or several PhD students presenting their latest empirical findings on issues related to China’s economy. Past topics have included college major selection as an obstacle to socioeconomic mobility, the effect of a cooling-off period on marriage outcomes, and factors contributing to government corruption. Faculty and senior scholars provide comments and feedback for improvement. This event series helps to build and strengthen Stanford’s community of young researchers working on China.

Workshops are held on select Fridays starting at 12 pm. Lunch will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Quality of Primary Healthcare and Family Antibiotic Consumption in Rural China: A Machine-Learning Approach

Speaker: Yunwei Chen, Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions

Inappropriate antibiotic use presents a unique challenge to global health. Despite the widespread practice of limiting antibiotic use through doctor-prescribed prescriptions in developed countries, this approach may not be effective in resource-limited settings where providers are unable to prescribe effectively. Investing in quality primary healthcare may offer an effective alternative to promoting effective antibiotic dispensing in community settings, but evidence remains limited and few studies are devoted to these settings. Using extensive data collected from approximately 100 rural villages in remote areas of Yunnan Province in southwest China, this paper investigates how the practicing quality of village providers affects family antibiotic consumption. Provider quality was assessed through unannounced clinical visits by standardized patients presenting consistent conditions, which were then linked to antibiotic consumption data obtained from household surveys in the same villages. We identified causal effects using the newly developed double/debiased machine learning approach, by leveraging extensive information collected from village providers to approximate the optimal instrument, using a variety of machine learning algorithms. Our analysis indicates that improving the practicing quality of village doctors significantly reduced inappropriate family use of antibiotics in remote rural areas of China.

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer emerging China scholars an opportunity to engage directly with interdisciplinary faculty and peers from across campus to discuss and receive feedback on their research. Each workshop features one or several PhD students presenting their latest empirical findings on issues related to China’s economy. Past topics have included college major selection as an obstacle to socioeconomic mobility, the effect of a cooling-off period on marriage outcomes, and factors contributing to government corruption. Faculty and senior scholars provide comments and feedback for improvement. This event series helps to build and strengthen Stanford’s community of young researchers working on China.

Workshops are held on select Fridays starting at 12 pm. Lunch will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Gendered Impacts of Privatization: A Life Cycle Perspective from China

Speaker: Yuli Xu, Ph.D. Candidate, Economics Department, University of California San Diego

Women at different life stages may respond differently to economic shocks as they face varying trade-offs. This paper examines the impact of privatization on gender inequality across the life cycle. We leverage a unique event in China: the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the 1990s, which resulted in over 35 million layoffs and disrupted the previously enforced gender equality in employment. Leveraging both regional variations in reform intensity, proxied by initial differences in SOE employment share, and temporal variation in the reform, our event study analysis shows that older women were more likely to be laid off and had greater difficulty finding re-employment than men. Middle-aged women were less likely than men to transition into the emerging private sector or pursue entrepreneurship. Younger women faced reduced opportunities in SOEs and prioritized education more than men. Both young men and women postponed marriage. Further mechanism analysis suggests that privatization has increased demand for high-skilled workers and reinforced traditional gender role attitudes.

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer emerging China scholars an opportunity to engage directly with interdisciplinary faculty and peers from across campus to discuss and receive feedback on their research. Each workshop features one or several PhD students presenting their latest empirical findings on issues related to China’s economy. Past topics have included college major selection as an obstacle to socioeconomic mobility, the effect of a cooling-off period on marriage outcomes, and factors contributing to government corruption. Faculty and senior scholars provide comments and feedback for improvement. This event series helps to build and strengthen Stanford’s community of young researchers working on China.

Workshops are held on select Fridays starting at 12 pm. Lunch will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Censorship Outside the Great Firewall: Flooding X/Twitter with Pornography for Political Suppression

Speaker: Tongtong Zhang, Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Stanford Internet Observatory

How do authoritarian rulers suppress criticism on social media platforms which they cannot directly control? In this paper, we find that off-putting pornographic content is disproportionately inundating the X/Twitter accounts of critics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime. We assess the possibility that the regime strategically uses this explicit content to discourage people from accessing information it wishes to suppress. Using an original dataset of 142 randomly sampled Chinese-language pornography accounts on X/Twitter, we show that during fall 2023, these accounts acted in a coordinated network to post waves of explicit images and videos as tweet replies to CCP critics. Some anti-CCP media accounts (less than 1 million followers) receive over 1,000 pornographic comments within a week, whereas pro-CCP media (over 10 million followers) receive fewer than 4 such comments a week. When a tweet is opened or shared, this explicit content appears directly beneath the text, which likely discourages users from reading or sharing the targeted tweets. While previous research has established that the CCP regime crowds out criticism by flooding domestic platforms with positive and cheerleading messages, our findings suggest that on platforms that operate beyond its borders, the regime may use censorship strategies that are domestically illegal—spamming explicit content to create strategic distraction.
 

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Thursday from 1 - 2 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Webinar recording: https://youtu.be/sp4EWuLct7E 

Following the end of World War II, more than 45,000 young Japanese women married American GIs and came to the United States to embark upon new lives among strangers. The mother of Kathryn Tolbert, a former long-time journalist with The Washington Post, was one of them.

Tolbert noted, “I knew there was a story in my mother’s journey from wartime Japan to an upstate New York poultry farm. In order to tell it, I teamed up with journalists Lucy Craft and Karen Kasmauski, whose mothers were also Japanese war brides, to make a short documentary film through a mother-daughter lens. Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides was released in August 2015 and premiered on BBC World Television.”

Tolbert spent a year traveling the country to record interviews, funded by a Time Out grant from her alma mater, Vassar College. The Japanese War Brides Oral History Archive is the result of her interviews. The Oral History Archive documents an important chapter of U.S. immigration history that is largely unknown and usually left out of the broader Japanese American experience. In these oral histories, Japanese immigrant women reflect on their lives in postwar Japan, their journeys across the Pacific, and their experiences living in the United States.

Join Kathryn Tolbert as she describes bringing the legacy of these stories to life through the documentary film, oral history archive project, and upcoming Smithsonian traveling exhibit. Waka Takahashi Brown, SPICE curriculum writer, will also share an overview of the teacher’s guide that she developed to accompany the documentary film, which is available to download for free from the SPICE website.

To attend, register here.

This webinar is sponsored by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA), and the USC U.S.-China Institute.

Featured Speakers:

Kathryn Tolbert is a former editor and reporter on the Metro, National and Foreign desks, a correspondent in Tokyo and director of recruiting and hiring at The Washington Post. She has also worked for The Boston Globe and the Associated Press. In addition, she has written about Japanese women who married American servicemen after World War II and co-directed the film Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides. Tolbert is a graduate of Vassar College with a BA in Political Science and an MA in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Waka Takahashi Brown is an educator and writer. She manages and teaches Stanford e-Japan for SPICE and has authored curriculum on several international topics. She is the recipient of the Association for Asian Studies’ national Franklin Buchanan Prize, and has also been awarded the 2019 Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher award for her groundbreaking endeavors in teaching about U.S.–Japan relations to high school students in Japan and promoting cultural exchange awareness. In addition, Brown has authored three middle-grade novels: While I Was Away; Dream, Annie, Dream; and The Very Unfortunate Wish of Melony Yoshimura. She is a Stanford graduate with a BA in International Relations and an MA in Secondary Education.

Graduate Students Practical Workshop

Research Roadmap: Fieldwork Finances 101

All you need to know about research budgets, contracts, and paying for fieldwork expenses

Wednesday, February 28, 2024 | 12:00 pm -1:00 pm Pacific Time
Gunn SIEPR Building, Doll 320

About the Speakers
 

Stephen Luby, Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology and Populatin Health by Courtesy at Stanford University

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Stephen Luby is a professor of medicine and a professor of epidemiology and population health by courtesy at Stanford University. He is also a senior fellow of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His previous positions include directing the Centre for Communicable Diseases at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases Research in Bangladesh, conducting research and teaching epidemiology at the Aga Khan University in Karachi in Pakistan, and working as an epidemiologist in the Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Alexis Medina, Associate Director of Research Programs at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions

Alexis Medina is the Associate Director of Research Programs at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. She has extensive experience in international program management, including overseeing the design and development of field projects, coordinating data collection and analysis, and navigating bureaucracies on both sides of the Pacific.

Large-Scale Datasets & Analysis in China

A Practical Workshop for Graduate Students

Friday, December 15, 2023 | 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Pacific Time
Encina Hall East, Goldman Room E409