Implications of gender and household roles in Indigenous Maya communities in Guatemala for child nutrition interventions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Guatemala’s Indigenous Maya population suffers from some of the highest rates of chronic child malnutrition (stunting) in the world. Most attempts to improve child nutrition in this context target mothers for behavioural interventions. In this study, we use focus group data from two Indigenous Maya communities to explore gender and intra-household power dynamics as they relate to child-rearing practices and to nutritional decision-making, including food purchasing. Findings of the study show that mothers are not autonomous with regard to child rearing and nutrition decision-making. In particular, paternal grandmothers are authoritative sources of knowledge and exert significant power over food-purchasing decisions. Furthermore, men overestimate the degree to which decision-making is shared with their wives, and the economic contributions that mothers make to household budgets often go unrecognized. These findings underscore that nutritional interventions in Indigenous Maya communities must be sensitive to the traditional intra-household authority structure and seek to engage not only mothers, but also fathers and paternal grandmothers in a productive collaboration. Furthermore, efforts must be made to increase recognition of the economic contributions of the mother to the household budget, and to recognize the implications of such economic work in terms of constraints on the mother’s availability for childcare.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".