Statistical analysis of child mortality and its determinants

Abstract

Worldwide, childhood mortality rates have decline over the years due majorly to various action plans and interventions targeted at various communicable diseases and other immunizable childhood infections which have been major causes of child mortality, but the situation seems to remain unchanged in sub-Saharan African countries, as approximately half of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa despite the region having only one fifth of the world's children population. Many covariates associated with variations in infant and child mortality are interrelated, and it is important to attempt to isolate the effects of individual variables for proper and effective interventions. This study examined the socio-economic and demographic determinants of child mortality using principal component analysis as a data reduction technique with varimax rotation to assess the underlying structure for nine measured variables, explaining the covariance relationships amongst the correlated variables in a more parsimonious as a way of child mortality modelling in Nigeria. From the analysis and result, two factors component was identified and the total variance explained is 97.25 percent. The result shows that 70.59 percent of the variance was accounted for by the first factor while the second and third factors accounted for 19.9 percent and 6.78 percent respectively. It is particularly instructive to note that more than 97 percent of the variance is accounted for by the first three factors. The first factor which seems to index mother education had a very strong loading on wealth quintile, residence, birth order and zone. The second factor which seemed to index previous birth had high loadings on child sex, birth sex, birth size (weight of the baby at birth in kilogram)and as well as mother's age.

Keywords: Child mortality, Socio-economic and demographic determinants, Mortality rate, Varimax rotation and Principal component analysis.