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ANALYSIS OF CLUSTERED WOMEN’S BIRTH INTERVALS IN MALAWI

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datacite.subject.fosNatural sciences
dc.contributor.authorWasela, Chikumbutso Willard
dc.date.accessioned2025-01-24T08:36:56Z
dc.date.available2025-01-24T08:36:56Z
dc.date.issued2024-08-01
dc.descriptionThesis submitted to the Department of Mathematical Science, School of Natural and Applied Science, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science(Biostatistics)
dc.description.abstractThe short or long birth interval is a common public health issue that affects women’s and children’s health in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite a higher burden of short or long birth intervals, establishing causal relationships between birth intervals and their determinants remains challenging due to the potential for unobserved confounding factors. The objective of this research is to apply parametric and semiparametric survival mixed-effects regression, especially the shared frailty model to model the length of time to successive second births within the reproductive mothers and identify the sociodemographic and sociocultural factors that cause variation in the length of the birth interval using 2015-16 Malawi Demographic Health Survey data. Weibull mixed-effects survival model with gamma-distributed random effects provides a better fit for describing the birth interval data than Cox proportional hazard mixed-effects with normal and gamma random effects, exponential mixed-effects with normal and gamma random effect, and Weibull mixed effects with normal random effect. The findings also revealed that mothers from rural areas, the central region, and those who use traditional or modern contraceptive methods had a higher likelihood of having a second child. In contrast, women from middle or rich families, those with secondary or tertiary education, and those who had their first child alive had a lower likelihood of giving birth to a second child. This study uses gamma and normal densities for random effects distribution, suggesting future studies should consider other random effects distributions like positive stable, compound poisson, and inverse Gaussian.
dc.identifier.urihttps://dspace.unima.ac.mw/handle/123456789/684
dc.language.isoen
dc.schoolscentersoptionsb0e8094e-c230-4f28-8ae9-b0fc60729932
dc.subjectWomen
dc.subjectBirth Intervals
dc.subjectClusters
dc.subjectPublic Health
dc.subjectEducation
dc.subjectChildren
dc.subjectLong birth interval
dc.subjectContraceptive methods
dc.subjectPublic health issue
dc.subjectParametric regression models
dc.subjectSemi-parametric survival regression model
dc.subjectTertiary education
dc.supervisor60e36d97-6ad4-4bb9-812f-2d31ed4b7be1
dc.titleANALYSIS OF CLUSTERED WOMEN’S BIRTH INTERVALS IN MALAWI
dc.title.alternativeAPPLICATION OF PARAMETRIC AND SEMI-PARAMETRIC SURVIVAL MIXED-EFFECTS REGRESSION MODELS
dc.typetext::thesis::master thesis
dspace.entity.typePublication
oairecerif.author.affiliationUniversity of Malawi

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