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Heuveline P and Hong S

The RGC has recently taken steps towards an integrated social protection system. In 2007, the RGC gradually
implemented an official poverty targeting system known as the IDPoor, with households identified as poor (IDPoor 1) or
extremely poor (IDPoor 2) receiving an IDPoor Card. By 2012, almost all rural areas were covered. In 2011, the RGC also
created a National Social Protection Strategy (NSPS) for 2011–15, and in 2013, pilot programs started to be implemented
in order to experiment with the design and delivery mechanisms for safety nets. Despite the availability of this targeting
mechanism, limited fiscal revenues seriously constrain the extent of social protection that national institutions and
government agencies can provide. In 2013, the World Bank estimated that the coverage of safety nets remained at only
2% of the poorest quintile of the population (World Bank, 2014). A high share of the population thus continues to face
serious vulnerabilities that may induce a temporary inability to face education and health expenditures. To cope, most
households continue to rely primarily on their extended kin network (Kim, 2011; Heuveline and Hong, 2016).
1.3 Conceptual Framework and Hypotheses

Based on the framework developed in Heuveline, Yang and Timberlake, (2010) to study international differences in
the effects of children’s living arrangements on their educational outcomes, we conceptualize living arrangements as
operating through the “quality” and “quantity” of parenting available to children. Even though the involvement of the non-
residential parent(s) may vary, living with only one or no biological parent is expected to reduce the quantity of parenting.
Single parents’ own parenting might be affected, as research documents the “time deficit” they experience when parenting
alone (Hill, Yeung and Duncan, 2001; Bianchi, Robinson and Milkie, 2006). The additional stress associated with single
parenting and poor communication between parents living apart might also affect the quality of parenting. Accordingly,
and as repeatedly reported across diverse contexts in the literature reviewed above, we expect children residing with
both biological parents to have better educational outcomes than children who do not, even after controlling for observed
differences in household resources (Hypothesis 1).
However, this conceptual framework also emphasizes that parents draw the resources their children need from a larger
environment that includes not just the labor market but also governmental programs that may be in place to support
families with children. Following Pong, Dronkers and Hampden-Thompson (2003), we expect that family policies that
equalize resources between different types of families reduce the educational gradient. Moreover, public funding for
education may reduce the impact that differences in resources have on educational outcomes. As discussed in the previous
section, at the time data used in this study were collected, Cambodia still very much lacked the type of welfare support
that might be available in Western or East Asian societies. This would lead us to hypothesize that the educational gradient
in Cambodia should be larger than average in Western societies (Hypothesis 2a).
Another important aspect of the larger context in which households operate, albeit difficult to measure precisely, is
the cultural environment which affects, in particular, the extent to which less traditional households are stigmatized or
supported by their communities. Results reviewed above from Malaysia, Indonesia, or Thailand showed smaller than
expected differences in outcomes that might be linked to the relatively large share of non-stigmatized widows among the
single parents with children. Similarly for Cambodia, one may alternatively hypothesize that the educational gradient
should be smaller than average in Western societies (Hypothesis 2b).
The most direct form of communal support is arguably multi-family household formation, allowing for different
families to share a substantial amount of resources and time, and for parenting to be provided by adult co-residents other
than the biological parents. As documented in Safman (2003) for Thailand, and equally valid for Cambodia, grand-
parents are parents’ preferred “social” parents in the event they cannot take care of their children themselves. As reviewed
above, studies have generally found that children not living with one or both of their biological parents fare better in
multi-generational households (with at least one grand-parent present). Results to the contrary have been attributed to a
strong negative selection into such households when these represent a strong deviation from the norm. As a great deal
of tolerance and pragmatism with respect to living arrangements has been reported in Cambodia, we expect that more
favorable educational outcomes for children living in multi-generational households than for those of children living in
other household structures (Hypothesis 3).
2 Data and Methods

This paper utilizes survey data from the Mekong Integrated Population-Registration Areas of Cambodia (MIPRAoC)
project. The MIPRAoC project grew out of The Mekong Island Population Laboratory (MIPopLab, 2000–2006;
ICPSR36601-v1). Both projects include occasional, topical, “rider” social-science surveys built on a longitudinal health
and demographic surveillance system (HDSS). The analyses presented in this paper are based on the baseline survey (2008)
of the MIPRAoC HDSS. We first describe this survey, then describe the variablesconstructed from these data and our

International Journal of Population Studies | 2017, Volume 3, Issue 2 5