Almost every time that I’ve presented one of my dissertation papers, someone comes up to me to tell me about some experience they have had that is relevant to my paper. Often, they’re not happy. My paper on parental relationship quality and reading to children tends to really rile up single mothers, all of whom want to tell me how they managed to be good parents despite having unhappy marriages. Mostly, I reiterate how these are average and then just smile and thank them for their input.
Occasionally, though, someone tells me something inspiring, or sad, that really touches me. A student came to tell me about her own experiences with a violent relationship after I presented some of my research, and many others have told me stories about parenting.
Today, I presented the second chapter of my dissertation at the Central Pennsylvania Consortium’s annual Women, Gender, and Sexuality conference. That’s a mouthful, no? My second paper explores the extent to which promises of financial support given to single mothers by the fathers of their children have an influence on financially-constrained investments in children as the child gets older.
As we all finished, a woman who works at the College came up to tell me her story of growing up in Jamaica. She told me how formula was marketed to upper class mothers and so became a sign of wealth. And conversely, breastfeeding became a sign of poverty. Many mothers with few resources, she said, wanted to appear as though they were giving their children formula–the marketed as healthier option as well as the option that signaled ability to pay. Consequently, these mothers would use their limited resources to buy formula, but then would water it down in order to have more opportunities to show they were feeding their children with formula.
It broke my heart to hear it, but it also showcases a rather important problem that economists have. When we rely on survey data and on averages, all of these women would say that they used formula, but likely the nutritional outcomes for their children would be much different. So, not only is there a reporting problem whereby poor mothers might understate for how long and whether they breastfed, but the quality of the alternative has much more variability in nutritional value.
Outside of the measuring problem, I don’t think we’re all that good at identifying these types of what we would call irrational behavior. Without having interviewed women in depth or been there to witness this behavior, we likely would not include it in our analysis, leading to biased estimates.
ERIN K. FLETCHER 
A tells similar stories of formula marketing in Trinidad. 😦
I have a vague recollection of a similar conversation with him regarding this. It’s sad, no?