The Effect of Education on Under-Five Mortality: Individual and Community-Level Effects in Bangladesh
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1973-2201/8584Keywords:
Parental education, Under-five mortality, Multilevel model, Contextual effectAbstract
This paper investigates the relationship between parental education and child survival, considering both the influence of the maternal and paternal educational level and the influence of communitylevel male and female education on under-five mortality. The research is focused on Bangladesh, a country where the impressive decline in the under-five mortality rate between 1990 and 2015 was attributed both to female empowerment and to the increase in the general level of education in the country. Using the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey from 2014, this paper investigates both the effect of individual-level parental education and of community-level education on under-five mortality, through a multilevel logistic regression analysis. Our results confirm the importance of individual-level education, with a stronger effect of the educational level of mothers compared to that of fathers. This last result disappears once we control for educational assortative mating. At the contextual level, the average level of female education in the community only slightly influences under-five survival, whereas male schooling does not at all impact the chances of survival of a child aged under five.
References
T. AKTER, D. HOQUE, E. CHOWDHURY, M. RAHMAN, M. RUSSELL, S. ARIFEEN (2015). Is there any association between parental education and child mortality? A study in a rural area of Bangladesh. Public Health, 129, no. 12, pp. 1602–1609.
A. G. BOCO (2010). Individual and community level effects on child mortality: An analysis of 28 demographic and health surveys in Sub-Saharan Africa. DHS Working Papers 73, United States Agency for International, Development (USAID), Calverton, MD. URL www.measuredhs.com.
L. BREIEROVA, E.DUFLO (2004). The impact of education on fertility and child mortality: Do fathers really matter less than mothers? NBER Working Paper 10513, National Bureau of Economic Research.
J. CALDWELL, P. MCDONALD (1982). Influence of maternal education on infant and child mortality: Levels and causes. Health Policy and Education, 2, no. 3-4, pp. 251–267.
A. M. R. CHOWDHURY, A. BHUIYA, M. E. CHOWDHURY, S. RASHEED, Z. HUSSAIN, L. C. CHEN (2013). The Bangladesh paradox: Exceptional health achievement despite economic poverty. The Lancet, 382, no. 9906, pp. 1734–1745.
J. CLELAND (2010). The benefits of educating women. The Lancet, 376, no. 9745, pp. 933–934.
T. N. CROFT, A. M. MARSHALL, C. K. ALLEN (2018). Guide to DHS statistics. Tech. rep., ICF, Rockville, MD.
R. D. DIETZ (2002). The estimation of neighborhood effects in the social sciences: An interdisciplinary approach. Social Science Research, 31, no. 4, pp. 539–575.
M. ESWARAN (2002). The empowerment of women, fertility, and child mortality: Towards a theoretical analysis. Journal of Population Economics, 3, no. 2, pp. 433–454.
H. GOLDSTEIN (2003). Multilevel Statistical Models, vol. 922. Hodder Arnold, London.
T. B.HEATON (2015). Are improvements in child health due to increasing status of women in developing nations? Biodemography and Social Biology, 61, no. 3, pp. 252–265.
J. HOBCRAFT (1993). Women’s education, child welfare and child survival: A review of the evidence. Health Transition Review, 61, no. 3, pp. 159–175.
B. HOSSAIN (2015). Women empowerment and infant mortality in Bangladesh. Applied Economics, 47, no. 51, pp. 5534–5547.
J. HOX (2002). Multilevel Analysis: Techniques and Applications. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.
M. N. HUQ, T. TASNIM (2008). Maternal education and child healthcare in Bangladesh. Maternal and Child Health Journal, 12, no. 1, pp. 43–51.
C. KALDEWEI (2010). Determinants of infant and under-five mortality - the case of Jordan. Technical note, Economic Affairs Officer at the Development Policy and Analysis Division of the United Nations.
Ø. KRAVDAL (2003). Child mortality in India: Exploring the community-level effect of education. Technical note, Health Economics Research Programme, Oslo University.
L. LADUSINGH, C. H. SINGH (2006). Place, community education, gender and child mortality in North-east India. Population, Space and Place, 12, no. 1, pp. 65–76.
M. LIVI BACCI (1999). Introduzione alla Demografia. Loescher, Torino.
P. MAITRA (2004). Parental bargaining, health inputs and child mortality in India. Journal of Health Economics, 23, no. 2, pp. 259–291.
A. K. MAJUMDER, S. S. ISLAM (1993). Socioeconomic and environmental determinants of child survival in Bangladesh. Journal of Biosocial Science, 25, no. 3, pp. 311–318.
D. W. MATTESON, J. A. BURR, J. R. MARSHALL (1998). Infant mortality: A multilevel analysis of individual and community risk factors. Social Science & Medicine, 47, no. 11, pp. 1841–1854.
H. MOESTUE, S. HUTTLY, L. SARELLA, S. GALAB (2007). ‘The bigger the better’– mothers’ social networks and child nutrition in Andhra Pradesh. Public Health Nutrition, 10, no. 11, pp. 1274–1282.
M. N. I. MONDAL, M. K. HOSSAIN, M. K. ALI (2009). Factors influencing infant and child mortality: A case study of Rajshahi District, Bangladesh. Journal of Human Ecology, 26, no. 1, pp. 31–39.
H. NAZIER, R. RAMADAN (2017). Marriage outcomes and women empowerment after marriage: A three countries story. Working Paper Series 1074, Economic Research Forum.
NIPRT (2016). Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2014. Tech. rep., National Institute of Population Research and Training, Mitra and Associates, and ICF International, Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Rockville, Maryland.
D. N. ONONOKPONO, C. O. ODIMEGWU (2017). Determinants of maternal health care utilization in Nigeria: A multilevel approach. The Pan African Medical Journal, 11, no. 2, pp. 283–294.
M. OZER, J. FIDRMUC, M. A. ERYURT (2017). Does maternal education affect childhood immunization rates? Evidence from Turkey. Working Paper Series 6439, CESifo.
H. PAPANEK (1973). Purdah: Separate worlds and symbolic shelter. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 15, no. 3, pp. 289–325.
S. PARASHAR (2005). Moving beyond the mother-child dyad: Women’s education, child immunization, and the importance of context in rural India. Social science&Medicine, 61, no. 5, pp. 989–1000.
C. PUGLISI, A. BUSETTA (2018). Women’s empowerment and child mortality: The case of Bangladesh. In A. ABBRUZZO, E. BRENTARI, M. CHIODI, D. PIACENTINO (eds.), Book of Short Papers SIS 2018. Pearson, Milano, pp. 1713–1718.
M. I. RAYHAN, M. S. H. KHAN (2006). Factors causing malnutrition among under five children in Bangladesh. Pakistan Journal of Nutrition, 5, no. 6, pp. 558–62.
M. SELL, N. MINOT (2018). What factors explain women's empowerment? Decisionmaking among small-scale farmers in Uganda. Women’s Studies International Forum, 71, pp. 46–55.
M. UDDIN, M. HOSSAIN, M. ULLAH (2009). Child mortality in a developing country: A statistical research. Journal of Applied Quantitative Methods, 4, no. 2, pp. 142–8.
K.VIKRAM, R.VANNEMAN, S.DESAI (2012). Linkages between maternal education and childhood immunization in India. Social science & Medicine, 75, no. 2, pp. 331–339.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2019 Statistica
This journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (full legal code).
Authors accept to transfer their copyrights to the journal.
See also our Open Access Policy.
