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Measures of children's time use, particularly with parents and siblings, are used to evaluate three hypotheses in relation to the vocabulary and mathematical skills development: (1) the resource dilution hypothesis, which argues that parental and household resources are diluted in larger families; (2) the confluence hypothesis, which suggests that the intellectual milieu of families is lowered with additional children; and (3) the admixture ('no effect') hypothesis, which suggests that the negative relationship between family size and achievement is an artifact of cross-sectional research resulting from unobserved heterogeneity. Each hypothesis is tested using within-child estimates of change in cognitive scores over time with the addition of new children to families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research concerning the relationship between female status and demographic behaviour has largely concluded that community level influences are most important, while status and autonomy at the individual level are far less so. This consensus, however, rests on an untested a priori typology of women’s status and tenuous assumptions about the measurement of defined status dimensions on the individual level. To better understand the potential influences of both community and individual elements it is necessary to take a step back and assess the validity of the constructs of autonomy used. This work uses a latent variable measurement modelling framework to test both the dimensionality of women’s status and the appropriateness of using simple additive index scaling in constructing measures of women’s status on the individual level using questions from the Demographic and Health Surveys status-of-women module in India for 1998/1999. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]