Homeschoolers and Health Care

This post reviews Alissa Cordner, “The Health Care Access and Utilization of Homeschooled Children in the United States” in Social Science and Medicine 75 (2012): 269-273.

Cordner, a graduate student in sociology at Brown University, here offers her first foray into homeschooling research.  She used the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), a government phone survey of over 91,000 households randomly sampled from the national population.  The NSCH asked families about the kind of schooling the child being reported on attended, including homeschooling, so Cordner’s got great data from which to draw conclusions.

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Homeschoolers and Vaccinations

This post reviews Elizabeth L. Thorpe, et al., “Homeschooling Parents’ Practices and Beliefs about Childhood Immunizations” in Vaccine, 30, no. 6 (February 2012): 1149-1153.

This paper, written by a group of physicians and medical researchers, noting the rise both in occurrences of “vaccine preventable disease” (VPD) and the rise in homeschooling, tries to probe the attitudes of homeschoolers toward vaccination.

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Perry on Homeschooler Nutrition

This post briefly reviews Stephen D. Perry, “Comparison of Nutritional Intake of Home School Children and Public School Children: A Comparison Study” (M.S. Thesis, 2008) [available fulltext here]

Perry, a lecturer in Food Science at the University of Kentucky, argues that there is a real difference in food consumption between homeschooled students and those who attend public schools.

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Homeschool Diversity Roundup

One of the most interesting recent developments in homeschooling is the expansion of the practice to populations that historically have not been associated with it.  Given the dearth of representative, randomized sampling studies of homeschoolers, it has been very hard to quantify growth of this sort.  Many of the most oft-cited studies of homeschoolers, such as those conducted by Brian Ray and HSLDA (which I review here and here), use methods of data collection that lead to an over-representation of conservative Protestants.  Even the best quantitative data available can’t deliver even basic information on the racial, socio-economic, or ideological diversity among homeschoolers.

Another, less reliable way of getting at the growth of homeschooling among groups that have not traditionally done it is to attend to newspaper articles and so forth that offer more impressionistic, often intimate portraits of homeschooling.  This post briefly makes note of several recent news stories that describe homeschooling among a wide assortment of Americans who are choosing it for many reasons.

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Khalili and Caplan on Homeschoolers and Vaccinations

This post reviews Donya Khalili and Arthur Caplan, “Off the Grid: Vaccinations Among Homeschooled Children” in Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics 35, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 471-477.

Khalili, a University of Pennsylvania law student, and Caplan, director of Penn’s Center for Bioethics, argue here that the large number of unvaccinated homeschooled children in the United States poses a public health threat that must be met. 

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