Mothers’ health knowledge for children with diarrhea: who you are or who you know?

This paper explores the relationship among Indian mothers’ health knowledge regarding proper treatment of diarrhea in children and caste, religion and other mediators, estimating causal impacts through a combination of instrumental variables and matching methods. The results indicate that both caste/religious affiliation and access to health networks (measured across three different dimensions) are important determinants of health knowledge. High caste and non-Muslim women are more likely to have correct health knowledge, but not when accounting for greater female education within these groups. Women with access to health networks are also more likely to have correct knowledge. Additionally, high caste women benefit more in terms of health knowledge from having health networks than women from other groups; except if the health worker is of the same caste/religion, in which case low caste and Muslim women sometimes benefit by twice as much or even more. If caste and religion-related differences in health knowledge are to be reduced it may not be enough to improve access to high quality health networks—such networks also have to be homophilous. Improved treatment from and confidence in the medical profession is found to be part of the mechanism linking health network access with improved health knowledge.