Health Knowledge and Nutritional Adequacy of Female Heads of Households in the United States

Over the last decade, a large number of studies have attempted to identify the influence of socioeconomic factors on individuals' nutrient intake. This literature provides insightful explanations of what determines nutrient consumption patterns, and from a public policy perspective, what steps may be taken to change consumer behavior and enhance the nutritional status of the population as a whole (Morgan 1986; Senauer, Asp, and Kinsey 1991). A criticism of the existing literature is that individuals from various social strata have been lumped together in broad studies of the population as a whole. Consequently, certain segments of the population have received less attention. The purpose of this study is to address this criticism by focusing on a specific group. The target population is female-headed households - consumer units with a female reference person, with or without children, and with no spouse present. This group is a growing proportion of the U.S. population, rising from 11.5 percent of all family groups in 1977 (Rawlings 1986) to over 23 percent in 1988 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1990). This growth is generally attributed to changing patterns of marriage, fertility, divorce, the tendency to live alone, and an increased earnings capacity for women (Wojkiewicz, McLanahan, and Garfinkel 1990). Poverty is the predominant characteristic of this segment of the population; as a consequence nearly 50 percent of this population is dependent on welfare (McLanahan and Booth 1989). Despite a growing concern for this segment of the population, no comprehensive analysis of factors influencing their nutritional adequacy currently exists. The present analysis aims to fill this gap. In general a better understanding of the link between nutrient intake and socioeconomic characteristics of individuals is fundamental to the design of public policies that target specific groups - for example, the Food Stamp Program (FSP) - or the public at large - for example, food product labeling. The literature on socioeconomic determinants of nutritional adequacy is extensive.(1) No previous work, however, has considered the nutritional adequacy of female-headed households using the types of variables considered in this study. A number of studies provides descriptive analyses of the economic characteristics of this population, particularly single mothers. Recently, Lino and Guthrie (1994) compared food expenditures, shopping behavior, and diet quality of single mothers with married mothers and concluded that the former have diets of lower quality. This conclusion was based on the finding that the mean values of three composite measures of diet quality were statistically different in the two samples. Lino and Guthrie suggested that ". . . nutrition education programs that consider the income constraints and food shopping behavior of single-parent families are needed" (1994, 20). Without multivariate analysis, however, it is unclear how they arrived at such recommendations. The present study removes such ambiguities by using multivariate analysis and new estimation techniques that reduce the errors associated with model specification - an important consideration in the context of modelling nutrient demand (Behrman and Deolalikar 1988; Ramezani 1993, 1995). Section two outlines the proposed modelling approach. Section three describes the data and the construction of new explanatory variables related to health knowledge, dietary perception, and educational attainment. Section four reports the results of the analysis. The key finding of the study is that nutrition knowledge and education are highly significant predictors of intake, suggesting that food choices are a likely consequence of informed decisions. Policies that aim to enhance nutritional knowledge are therefore likely to improve diets, independent of other household socioeconomic characteristics. Furthermore, as Mothersbaugh, Herrmann, and Warland (1993) found, higher levels of nutritional knowledge could mitigate the negative effects of time constraints, which are more severe for this segment of the population. …