Impact of maternal education and care on preschoolers' nutrition—application of two-way ANOVA

Explaining the nutritional status of children in various societies of the world has been of interest to nutritionists, epidemiologists, and physical anthropologists. While the causes of child malnutrition are multiple and complex, understanding these causes and devising strategies that generate better child health outcomes is the theme of this chapter. A few studies on the effect of maternal nutrition knowledge and schooling in India, good care practices and child nutrition in Ghana, and the impact of maternal schooling and maternal nutrition knowledge on child nutrition in Indonesia are used to exemplify the concepts and methods. We also discuss the issue of maternal education and family nutrition in the United States and Kenya. How specific variables affect child nutrition is analyzed using the two-way analysis of variance approach. We demonstrate using STATA how the main effect of an independent variable is partitioned into sums of squares and interpret the interaction effects and post hoc tests. Also, R codes are demonstrated for analyzing and interpretation of the results.