Please follow the link to view an early release of our paper on functional limitation trajectories of the Cebu cohort – Functional limitation trajectories and their determinants among women in the Philippines. It took several years and numerous rounds of analysis to finally complete this paper, but I believe the time and effort was worth it and the paper is now scheduled for publication in Demographic Research (Vol. 36, Article 30, pp 863-892).
I believe that the two most interesting findings of this research are as follows:
First, there has been an incredible amount of movement into and out of functional limitation across waves for these women. I think we might be the first to show the enormous amount of diversity in patterns of functional health over such a long period of time among women in a developing country setting.
Second, the typical way in which SES (socioeconomic status) characteristics tend to associate with health do not fit our analysis. Women who were living in wealthier household in 1983 when the baseline data were collected have ended up having worse functional health trajectories over time than women who were living in poorer households. The team writing the paper went back and forth with various ideas about why this might be the case. Whatever the reason, it is important to point out that SES characteristics are not universally associated with better health among the CLHNS (Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey) cohort.
I hope our paper contributes to the CLHNS project overall, and I hope that you may find something useful here for your own research using these data.
-Dr. Zachary Zimmer
globalagingandcommunity.com 