Cognitive performance following a natural disaster and demographic and socioeconomic outcomes

This Project Grant award, totaling $155,500.00, was provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) under the Child Health and Human Development Extramural Research program (CFDA 93.865). The grant will fund a research project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill focused on examining the relationship between cognitive performance and early adult outcomes, such as educational attainment, labor market success, marriage, and fertility, among young adults in Indonesia. The project will leverage longitudinal data from the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR) and the Extended Assessment of Biomarkers and Cognition (EABC) component, which includes tablet-based assessments of seven cognitive skills. The research aims to provide novel insights into how domain-specific cognitive abilities relate to key markers of the transition to adulthood, while also exploring the role of parental and family background characteristics, as well as the moderating effects of exposure to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Abstract

The transition to young adulthood involves navigating educational investments, job opportunities, entry into marital unions, and decisions about whether and when to have children. Behaviors and outcomes in these spheres are almost certainly shaped by levels of cognition, but we know relatively little about these links, particularly in low resource settings. This project will provide novel insights into how domain-specific cognitive skills that have a foundation in neuroscience are related to education, labor market success, entry into marriage, and fertility for young adults in indonesia. Data are drawn from the study of the tsunami aftermath and recovery (star), a 15-year population-representative panel study of households and individuals in aceh and north sumatra on the island of sumatra in indonesia, who were at risk of exposure to the 2004 indian ocean earthquake and tsunami. Star is representative of the pre-disaster population. In addition, we will harness data from a specially-designed subcomponent of star, the extended assessment of biomarkers and cognition (eabc), which involves two rounds of longitudinal data of a 25% randomly-selected subsample of star respondents that includes a tablet-based approach to precisely measuring seven different cognitive skills using game-like tasks adapted for the setting from widely-used assessments. We focus on respondents who were between 8 and 22 years in the first round of the eabc (13 years after the disaster), and so they were in adolescence and early adulthood in the second round (20 years after the disaster). We leverage our cognitive data and the panel design of the eabc and star to provide evidence on the association between performance in the cognitive tasks and key markers of the transition to adulthood. We will also examine the role of parental and family background characteristics in the association between cognition and early adult outcomes by adjusting for background characteristics and estimating models that focus on comparisons between siblings. Finally, we leverage the fact that the tsunami was completely unanticipated, exploiting exogenous local variation in the intensity of exposure to the tsunami to examine the role of a large unanticipated natural disaster in moderating the relationship between cognitive performance and early adult outcomes.