THE DETERMINANTS OF THE DURATION OF CONTRACEPTIVE USE IN CHINA - A MULTILEVEL MULTINOMIAL DISCRETE-HAZARDS MODELING APPROACH

Often in demography, individuals may change state over time for a vari ety of reasons. Competing-risks hazards models have been developed to model such situations. This paper describes the extension of the discr ete-time competing-risks hazards model to a multilevel framework that allows for data at different levels of aggregation. The model is illus trated with data from the 1988 Chinese National Survey of Fertility an d Contraceptive Prevalence, which collected complete contraceptive his tories. Women may stop using a method of contraception for a number of reasons; this paper describes how one can control for correlations be tween the outcomes of repeated spells of contraceptive use.