Malnutrition negatively affects children's health for the rest of their lives. Despite ample food supply worldwide, malnutrition afflicts large numbers of children in poor countries.

This study identifies and evaluates variables associated with malnutrition in Bolivian children under age five. It focuses on contextual variables—biophysical, demographic, and socioeconomic characteristics of the places where children live.

Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data enable analysis of individual children, with measurements of stunting and the level of hemoglobin in the blood employed as the outcome variables. Separate linear regression models for stunting and hemoglobin reveal significant associations with several variables that indicate attributes of children and their mothers and households and provide a reasonable means of controlling for individual variation to facilitate analysis of contextual variables.

The Olsen et al. categorization scheme for biomes and the Bolivian national census provide information used to estimate contextual variables, with values assigned for each child in the DHS data set. An analysis of variance is employed to test the hypothesis that there are statistically significant differences between biome groups. Linear regressions are used to examine the relationships between stunting and hemoglobin, on the one hand, and demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the municipalities where children reside, on the other. The outcome variables for this analysis are residuals from the linear regression models, representing deviation from an expected value, given individual characteristics.

Household wealth; age of child; vitamin A supplementation; number of children born to the mother; mother's years of formal schooling; literacy; and knowledge of SUMI (a national program that delivers health care to mothers and children) were significantly associated with stunting. The child's age, mother's years of formal schooling, and household wealth were significantly associated with hemoglobin level. After adjustment for individual and household characteristics, mild to moderate associations were found between contextual variables and malnutrition. While this analysis does not provide definitive conclusions, it contributes to a body of evidence that suggests that young children's nutrition status is linked to the biophysical, demographic, and socioeconomic characteristics of the places where they live. This work also paves the way to future avenues of inquiry.