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A startling number of students drop out from junior high school in rural China every year. Little is known about the social aspect of the dropout process in rural China. The goal of this paper is to examine the relationship between student peer relations and dropout behavior in rural China’s junior high schools. Covering 4596 students in 38 schools, our study finds that 6.9 percent of grade 7 students did not finish school, along with 12.3 percent of grade 8 students. Using a “push out and pull out” framework to understand peer relations, results suggest that both push out and pull out factors are strongly associated with student dropout.

This paper seeks to understand the learning outcomes that prevail across key subpopulations in China today. Data from a nationally representative survey show that rural youth are two years behind urban children in math and Chinese. Non-Han minorities, children in poorer counties, and children with less-educated parents are the most vulnerable.

This study explored how maternal and infant illness correlated with the risk of postpartum depression in the Chinese Qinba Mountains region. In total, 131 villages comprising 435 families with infants (&le, 6 months old) were randomly sampled. We collected data on maternal and infant illnesses and maternal health knowledge level. The Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale-21 was used to measure the risk of postpartum depression. We used descriptive statistics and multivariate logistic regression for the analysis. Infant overall health status was a risk factor for postpartum depression (odds ratio (OR) = 1.90, 95% Confidence Interval (95% CI) = 1.10~3.28), whereas maternal overall health status was not correlated with postpartum depression (OR = 1.36, 95% CI = 0.55~3.39). For specific illnesses, infants experiencing over two common illnesses in the past two weeks (OR = 1.98, 95% CI = 1.13~3.45) and mothers experiencing over two common pains within two weeks after delivery (OR = 1.77, 95% CI = 1.02~3.08) were risk factors for postpartum depression, whereas infants with mild and severe stunted growth, maternal C-section, and postpartum body mass index (normal or overweight) were not correlated with it (all p &gt, 0.050). Maternal health knowledge was an important moderator of maternal and infant illnesses on the risk of postpartum depression. In conclusion, maternal and infant illness were essential factors for the risk of postpartum depression in a poor rural region in western China, which may be mainly affected by the feeling of uncertainty of illness. Improved maternal and infant health and enhanced maternal health knowledge might alleviate the risk of postpartum depression.

Objective Chronic diseases can be controlled through effective self-management. The purpose of this study is to explore the regularity of clinical visits and medication adherence of patients with hypertension or diabetes (PDH), and its association with the first experience with care and individual factors in rural Southwestern China.Methods The authors draw on a dataset which comprised of 292 PDH and 122 village clinics selected from 122 villages in 10 counties in the rural areas of Yunnan province. Data was gathered through interviews with these patients and the directors of the village clinics in January 2018. Logistic regression models were performed using STATA 15.0.Results The data shows around 31% of hypertensive and 25% of diabetic patients neither visited physicians nor took medicine regularly during the preceding three months of the interview date. We also documented PDH first experience with care and found that a proportion of them did not initially choose to seek care from health facilities. The logistic regression results indicated that individual characteristics of the PDH, including patient age, health status, and economic level, as well as their first experience with care were significantly associated with their regular healthcare behavior. Moreover, in addition to providing medical services, on average each sample village clinic with around two physicians simultaneously managed 180 hypertensive and 45 diabetic patients.Conclusions Our paper shows how current self-management trends among PDH in the sample area was unsatisfactory, threatening the effective control of hypertension and diabetes in China. Even though healthcare reforms in China have been launched since 2009, this study revealed the need for further reforms in terms of improving self-management. The authors recommend an increase in the quantity and the quality of human resources in the primary healthcare realm in rural China, which should help provide better education and supervision services for self-management.

The high level of dropout from junior high school is one of the most serious challenges facing the human capital development of the next generation of workers in China's rural areas. The goal of this paper is to assess to what extent the educational expectations of students are correlated with dropout behavior at the junior high school level in China. Using panel data, this research finds that the cumulative dropout rate is high among grade 7 and 8 students within our sample (as high as 19.5 percent, which implies a 3-year dropout rate of around 25 percent). Importantly, we find that this high rate of dropout is significantly correlated with students' educational expectations. Specifically, students who reported their expected level of education is “less than high school” or “less than college” are five times and four times more likely to drop out during junior high school than their peers, respectively.