BIRTH SPACING, BREAST-FEEDING, AND EARLY CHILD-MORTALITY IN A TRADITIONAL INDIAN SOCIETY - A HAZARDS MODEL ANALYSIS

There are few studies of the interrelationships among breastfeeding, c hild spacing, and child mortality in traditional societies that incorp orate extensive controls for social and demographic characteristics of the mother and child. In this paper, we investigate the impact of bre astfeeding and the length of the preceding birth interval on early chi ld mortality (defined as a death in the first two years of life) using data from a traditional society of India. Multivariate hazards models are used to analyze the data. Most prior analyses related the impact of breastfeeding duration to the duration of child survivability by ta king breastfeeding as a fixed covariate. The present study has a metho dological focus in the sense that breastfeeding information from retro spective survey data is treated as a time-dependent covariate both as a status variate as well as a duration-with empirical findings compare d across the two specifications. The effects of postpartum amenorrhoea and various other demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of mo ther and child are also studied. The results suggest that breastfeedin g duration has a strong impact in reducing the relative risk of early child mortality; but it does not explain the effect of the length of t he preceding birth interval on early child mortality.