title: 'Mommy knows best': parents' perceptions of their infant's health.
abstract: The purpose of the research presented in this article is to analyze how parents assess their child's health, ranging from excellent to poor. Specifically, it asks how the sociodemographic and health characteristics of infants and parents influence parents' perceptions of their child's health status. The data for this research come from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), which are able to address the relationship between sociodemographic covariates and parents' perceptions of their child's health. Binary logistic regression techniques are used in a nested manner to model the way in which parents arrive at a subjective measure of their child's health status. The results indicate that prior diagnoses of health conditions, interaction with the health care system, parents' assessment of their own health and poverty status influence how parents determine their child's health status.
authors.affiliation: Department of Demography and Organization Studies, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA. johnelle.sparks@utsa.edu
authors.forename: Patrice
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Johnelle Sparks
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001294:Attitude to Health / Q000208:ethnology; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006304:Health Status; D006305:Health Status Indicators; D006306:Health Surveys; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007229:Infant Welfare / Q000208:ethnology / Q000523:psychology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D007348:Insurance, Health; D016015:Logistic Models; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D010290:Parents / Q000193:education / Q000523:psychology*; D010465:Perception; D012307:Risk Factors; D012647:Self-Assessment; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014481:United States