Grantee Research Project Results
2005 Progress Report: Family Decision Making and the Value of Preventing Childhood Developmental Impairment
EPA Grant Number: R830822Title: Family Decision Making and the Value of Preventing Childhood Developmental Impairment
Investigators: Krupnick, Alan J. , Bostrom, Ann , Hoffmann, Sandra , Adamowicz, Wiktor
Institution: Resources for the Future , University of Alberta , Georgia Institute of Technology
Current Institution: Resources for the Future , Georgia Institute of Technology , University of Alberta
EPA Project Officer: Hahn, Intaek
Project Period: September 1, 2003 through August 31, 2007 (Extended to August 31, 2008)
Project Period Covered by this Report: September 1, 2004 through August 31, 2005
Project Amount: $344,698
RFA: Valuation of Environmental Impacts on Children's Health (2002) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Human Health , Children's Health , Environmental Justice
Objective:
Environmental neurotoxins are believed to be a significant contributor to the developmental disabilities suffered by nearly 12 million U.S. children. Nearly 1 million American children have blood lead levels defined as lead poisoning.
Because children, especially young children, do not participate fully in the marketplace and do not have a mature capacity for judgment, most researchers believe that parents’ willingness to pay (WTP) for reduction in risks to their own children’s health should be part of benefits assessment for programs protecting children’s health. Because measurement of the value of benefits to children from environmental policy is a new endeavor, there is a lack of knowledge about how to appropriately estimate parents’ WTP to protect their children from environmental hazards. This study will use an intra-household resource allocation modeling framework to test the appropriateness of using alternative models of family decisionmaking to measure parental WTP to protect children from lead paint hazards.
The study is being conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers with expertise in environmental economics and decision analysis. In addition to improving survey design, data and analysis from the mental models phase of this study will provide information on how to better target lead abatement programs and education. A pilot-scale survey (250 couples with children under the age of 7 years) will be conducted in the Baltimore, Maryland, area and the greater Atlanta, Georgia, region.
The objectives of this research project are to: (1) provide more comprehensive valuation of reduction in risk of childhood developmental impairment applicable to lead and other neurotoxins by estimating parental WTP to reduce lead-paint hazards (current regulatory benefits assessments are based on cost-of-illness and human capital approaches); (2) develop more accurate methods of eliciting parental WTP for the protection of children’s health by testing the impacts of using intra-household resource allocation models rather than unitary household models; and (3) develop more systematic approaches to developing non-market survey instruments by using mental models to better understand the underlying decision process.
This research project has two phases. The first phase involves the use of mental models analysis to elicit mental maps of parents’ decisions about reducing their children’s health risks from exposure to lead paint. Parents will be interviewed individually and as a couple. The interviews will focus on parents’ risk perceptions, definition of the decision problem and choice set, and individual parents’ role in joint decisionmaking. The second phase will use the results of the mental models analysis to develop a stated-preference, conjoint behavior survey that will allow us to estimate the value of improvements to children’s health from reduced lead paint risks.
Progress Summary:
The first phase of this study is being directed by Dr. Ann Bostrom of the Georgia Institute of Technology. This is the mental models study designed to elicit parents’ mental maps. This phase of the research project has value by itself, because so little is known about how couples make decisions about protecting their children’s health, and as a more structured approach to development of a stated-preference survey. The mental models project will provide information on how parental risk attitudes and perceptions are formed and on the structure of decisionmaking in the family. The study will contribute to our understanding of how parents perceive lead hazards and to the decision science literature on family decision processes.
The mental models project involves four steps: (1) development of an expert model of hazards associated with lead paint; (2) development of an interview protocol and written survey instrument to elicit parents’ knowledge of lead and how they might make decisions regarding reducing lead paint exposure and related health effects in their children; (3) administration of the interview and survey; and (4) analysis of the results.
During the period September 2004 through August 2005, the draft expert model was distributed to seven lead hazard and abatement experts for review. Following the review, the model was modified and finalized. The expert model of lead hazards consists of an influence diagram that traces the hazard generation process as a series of influences on the relationship between lead in the home and health outcomes for children, and is backed by a detailed literature narrative for every step in this diagram. The expert model will serve as a basis of comparison to parents’ knowledge of lead risks in the mental models interviews.
We completed the mental models protocol and tested it with more than 10 one-on-one interviews, plus three full-blown couples interviews (involving separate interviews with each parent and then the parents together), and then finalized the protocol. These protocols were approved by the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Georgia Institutional Review Boards (IRBs).
Mental Models Interviews
Before each interview began, the parents were asked to write down the three most recent health decisions they made concerning their children. Then, while the parents were filling out their consent forms, the interviewers selected one decision that both parents had written down to ask them about during the interview. This step was taken to ensure that we could compare parents’ answers to each other and to their answers in the couple interview. The protocol begins by asking parents a series of questions about the aforementioned decision concerning their children’s health. This section of the protocol will give us information on parents’ responsibility for different types of decisions in the family and parents’ roles in making decisions about their children’s health. The next section of the protocol asks parents about their knowledge of environmental hazards in the home and then specifically asks them about the hazards to children from lead paint. In addition, during this section, the parents are asked to list the health effects associated with lead paint and the abatement options for lead paint. The third and final section of the interview protocol provides the parent with a hypothetical scenario about lead paint in his or her house and asks what information they would need to make the decision about abatement and what that decision would be. The written survey instrument includes questions about family characteristics, parents’ roles in household and children’s health decisions, time allocation to related tasks, an embedded, validated scale (the Dyadic Adjustment Scale developed by Spanier) for measuring the couples’ perceived quality of marital life, a set of widely used risk perception questions, and questions designed to assess parents’ mental models of lead paint risks.
The protocol was administered to 30 couples living in pre-1979 housing with children under the age of 7 years. Three interviews per couple were conducted. The interviews were conducted by Dr. Ann Bostrom (on our team) and her staff, as well as staff from the Survey Research Center at the University of Georgia, who also drew the sample. Interviews were conducted in person and audiotaped, in addition to the collection of written survey responses. Half of the interviews have been transcribed to date. There were numerous problems getting couples to interview at a central location, partly because of childcare requirements. Approximately one-half of the interviews were administered in the couples’ homes.
The second major task concerns development, administration, and analysis of the stated preference survey, to be administered to 250 couples. During the September 2004 to August 2005 period, we developed a “pre-draft” stated preference instrument, mainly to be used to help inform the mental models interview protocol (i.e., to ensure that any major inputs from the interviews needed for development of the stated preference survey were incorporated in the mental models protocol).
This pre-draft stated preference instrument begins by asking respondents about a purchase they could make that is unrelated to health. The purpose of this question is to familiarize the respondents with this type of question and to gauge how they make decisions when their children’s health is not at stake. Next, the survey presents information on lead exposure, lead poisoning, the health effects of lead poisoning at various blood lead levels, and treatment options using the data gathered from the expert model. This section of the survey provides the background information that parents need to make decisions concerning their children’s exposure to lead-based paint. Then, the survey presents possible options for determining if their children had been exposed to lead. The parents are given three options and the cost associated with each. Finally, the parents are given a hypothetical scenario in which their children are discovered to have an elevated blood lead level. They are given information on possible options to limit their children’s exposure to the lead-based paint in their house. They are then given a series of questions, like the one they answered in the beginning of the survey. They are presented with two possible ways to control lead paint, the effectiveness of both options in reducing their child’s blood lead level, and the cost of each option. They are asked to indicate if they would do nothing, choose option 1, or choose option 2. The survey ends with a series of debriefing and demographic questions.
Future Activities:
During the coming year, we plan to analyze the results of the mental model interviews. We also plan to compare these results to the expert model and write a paper for publication.
We then will turn to incorporating insights from the mental model results into a draft stated-preference survey instrument. Professor Robert Pollak, a leading researcher on family economics, has offered to review our stated-preference survey instrument. Professor Pollak has expressed an interest in continued involvement in the development of the stated-preference survey and will bring extensive knowledge of the literature on collective models of household decisions to the project. We anticipate having a completed stated-preference survey instrument by early 2006, and then going into the field shortly thereafter. Analysis should be completed by the end of the project period. During 2006, we also will be drafting publications based on the stated-preference study.
Journal Articles:
No journal articles submitted with this report: View all 16 publications for this projectSupplemental Keywords:
indoor air, paint chips, exposure, risk, risk assessment, effects, health effects, human health, vulnerability, sensitive populations, dose-response, organism, infants, children, age, susceptibility, cumulative effects, toxics, heavy metals, lead, treatment remediation, decisionmaking, conjoint analysis, observation, nonmarket valuation, contingent valuation, survey, psychological, preferences, mental models, expert models, socioeconomic, willingness-to-pay, social science, modeling, surveys, measurement methods, southeast, mid-Atlantic, Maryland, MD, Georgia, GA, EPA Region 3, EPA Region 4,, RFA, Scientific Discipline, Economic, Social, & Behavioral Science Research Program, Health, PHYSICAL ASPECTS, INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION, Health Risk Assessment, Risk Assessments, Physical Processes, decision-making, Children's Health, Ecology and Ecosystems, Environmental Policy, Economics & Decision Making, Social Science, multi-objective decision making, policy analysis, surveys, ecological risk assessment, economic valuation, decision analysis, decision making, age-related differences, dose-response, exposure, family decision making, market valuation models, standards of value, environmental values, adult valuation of children's health, human exposure, children's vulnerablity, morbidity valuation, willingness to pay (WTP), children's environmental health, public policy, willingness to pay, multi-criteria decision analysisProgress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.