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Household structure and child education in Cambodia

placement of children away from home to facilitate their school attendance.
A better understanding of the selection mechanisms into the various types of household structure would clearly be
needed to make causal claims about the effect of parental absence in Cambodia. The cross-sectional distribution of
household structures in Cambodia may seem more similar to the same distribution in the U.S.A. than expected. The
nuclear household structure dominates in Cambodia too. The main difference is a high level of flexibility and fluidity, for
children as well as for adults. Whereas in the West, except in rare circumstances, parents’ identical treatment of siblings
seems to be the norm, many Cambodian parents readily admit to providing differently to children that they perceive as
having different abilities and personalities from birth (Smith-Heffner, 1999). In Cambodia, accounting for the endogeneity
of children’s living arrangements would thus require controlling not just for parents’ characteristics, as is common in
studies in the West, but for children’s characteristics as well—a point that had also emerged from the earlier literature
of child fosterage. Not yet available at the time of this writing, additional data from subsequent MIPRAoC rounds will
allow longitudinal analyses to account for some of the effects of child characteristics and, in particular, for the strategic
placement of certain children away from the parental household.

Acknowledgments
The authors benefited from facilities and resources provided by the California Center for Population Research at UCLA
(CCPR), which receives core support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development (NICHD). The authors also acknowledge direct support from NICHD through a 2007–2014 research grant
to the first author. This research grant has provided major support to the Mekong Integrated Population-Registration Areas
of Cambodia (MIPRAoC) project, which provided the data analyzed in this paper. MIPRAoC integrates the activities
and extant data of The Mekong Island Population Laboratory (MIPopLab), which received major support from NICHD
through a 2002–2005 research grant to the first author. The transition from MIPopLab to MIPRAoC was supported by a
2005 seed grant to Alan Kolata and the first author from the Population Research Center, NORC and the University of
Chicago, through its NICHD infrastructure grant. Additional support has been provided by a 2014–2015 seed grant to
Adriana Lleras-Muney, Manisha Shah and the first author from the CCPR, a 2015–2016 pilot project award to the first
author from the University of Southern California/University of California-Los Angeles Biodemography Center, which
receives core support from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and a 2017 fellowship to the first author from the
Center for Khmer Studies.
In addition to the above institutions and individuals, the first author gratefully acknowledges advising from Colm
O’Muircheartaigh for the design of MIPRAoC. From 2005 to 2014, Poch Bunnak has served as the MIPRAoC project
manager. Since 2007, Samuel J. Clark oversees the database management of the project, with the assistance of Jeffrey
Eaton and Benjamin Clark. Dwight Davis also contributed to the coding and cleaning of the data files.
While they remain solely responsible for the content of this paper, the authors also wish to thank Wei-Jun Jean Yeung,
Hyunjoon Park, Shannon Cavanagh, Rachel Goldberg, and the participants of the UCLA Sociology Family Working
Group for suggestions made on an earlier version of this paper.
Authors’ Contribution

Patrick Heuveline designed the study, supervised the analyses and drafted the first draft of the manuscript. Savet Hong
prepared the data and conducted the analyses. The authors jointly revised the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest
The authors report no conflict of interest.

Ethics Approval

Ethics approval for the MIPRAoC Project has been obtained by the Internal Review Board of the University of California,
Los Angeles (IRB#11-002684) and from the National Ethics Committee for Health Research of the Ministry of Health,
Royal Government of Cambodia (#83NECHR). Consent was obtained from all human subjects in the study.

Grant Numbers and Funding Information

Research grant R01HD054618 (Heuveline, P.I.) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development (NICHD); California Center for Population Research, UCLA infrastructure grant R24HD041022
(Pebley, P.I.) from NICHD; University of Southern California/University of California-Los Angeles Biodemography
Center infrastructure grant P30AG017265 (Seeman and Crimmins, P.I.) from the National Institute on Aging (NIA);

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