According to the literature, the use of the Berkeley Puppet Interview (BPI) to measure Big Five personality traits in children provides reliable and valid scores. However, the implementation of the BPI could be costly, especially when working with large sample sizes. Big Five self-reports were collected from 1118 Mexican children aged 7–8 years using a modified version of the BPI protocol and a Spanish version of the Big Five questionnaire. The main objective of this study was to inquire whether some modifications in the application protocol of the BPI could still provide reliable personality scores for the population under study. We report item–rest correlation, Cronbach’s alpha and omega as reliability measures, and confirmatory factor analytic models to investigate dimensionality. The results show that the personality trait scores are markedly reliable and that the dimensionality of the instrument holds for the Mexican sample.

This paper estimates the prevalence and severity of dental fluorosis among participants in the first wave of The Aguascalientes Longitudinal Study of Child Development (EDNA). The analytical sample includes 1052 children in 100 public elementary schools. Dental fluorosis is determined using the Modified Dean’s Index. There is a 43% general dental fluorosis prevalence, and the estimated Community Fluorosis Index is 0.99. Five municipalities report average groundwater fluoride concentrations above the official Mexican guideline value of 1.5 mg/L. In those municipalities, there is a 50% average dental fluorosis prevalence. An ordered logistic regression analysis indicates that obesity in participants increases the likelihood of suffering more severe dental fluorosis symptoms compared with normal-weight participants (OR = 1.62, p < 0.05). Households consuming tap water are more likely to have children suffering more severe dental fluorosis symptoms (OR = 1.63, p < 0.05). Children aged 8 years are more likely to present more severe dental fluorosis symptoms than their peers aged 7 years (OR = 1.37, p < 0.05). Dental fluorosis will persist as a public health problem in Aguascalientes State unless appropriate technologies for fluoride removal from water are installed and operated

This paper introduces the readership to the Aguascalientes Longitudinal Study of Child Development (EDNA) and presents the first descriptive results. EDNA is a prospective, multi-thematic, and multidisciplinary longitudinal study of the cohort of children that began first grade in August 2016 in the public schools of the state of Aguascalientes, Mexico. The sample contains a group of 1,000 pupils from 100 public schools who are representative of the study population. Recontact is planned to occur every two years for at least three waves. The baseline survey was conducted between 2017 and 2018. The study consists of an interview with the primary carer of the randomly chosen pupil, an interview with the pupil at school and an interview with the pupil’s teacher at the premises of the Institute of Education of Aguascalientes. EDNA aims to identify and contribute to solving the problems faced by Mexican children to achieve healthy physical and intellectual development on their way to adult life

War can have long-lasting effects on individual mental health through war trauma. In this paper, we explore the impact of constantly recalling painful episodes related to the 1992-1995 Bosnia and Herzegovina conflict on individual mental health in 2001 using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) scale. Potential endogeneity and reverse causality issues are addressed using objective measures of war intensity recorded at the municipality level. We find that individuals experiencing war trauma have worse mental health six years after the end of the conflict. In particular, instrumental-variable estimates show that they score 16 points (more than 1.5 standard deviations) higher on the CES-D scale (with higher scores meaning more depression symptoms) and have a 60 percentage points higher probability of being at risk of depression. Our results are robust to a number of sensitivity checks accounting for individual geographical mobility and different treatment intensities, and suggest that the negative effects on mental health are not mainly mediated by physical health problems. Back-of-the envelope calculations show large economic costs of war-trauma.