Page 50 - IJPS-3-2

International Journal of Population Studies

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Multilevel analysis of infant

mortality and its risk factors in

South Africa

1*
Samuel Abera Zewdie and Vissého Adjiwanou 2
1 Ethiopian Development Research Institute, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
2 Centre for Actuarial Research, University of Cape Town

Abstract: The study analyzed infant mortality and its risk factors in South Africa. It
aimed to examine infant mortality in the country by taking into account the hierarchical
nature of the problem and investigate the with-in country variation in modeling. In
addition to the usual individual level risk factors of infant mortality, living standard,
mother’s education, and income inequality were defined at municipal level, while HIV
prevalence was fixed at province level. A multilevel logistic regression model was then
fitted with Bayesian MCMC parameter estimation procedure using the 2011 South
ARTICLE INFO African census data. Most of the demographic and socioeconomic variables identified
Received: June 21, 2017 at individual level were found significant. More remarkably, the result indicated that
Accepted: August 25, 2017
Published Online: September 3, communities with better living standard and women's education were associated with
2017 lower infant mortality rates, while higher income inequality and HIV prevalence in the
communities were associated higher levels of infant mortality. The changes in infants’
*CORRESPONDING AUTHOR odds of death were estimated to be 26%, -21%, 13% and 8% respectively for HIV,
Samuel Abera Zewdie,
Ethiopian Development women’s education, income inequality and level of the living standard. In addition,
Research Institute, Addis unobservable municipal and province level random effects significantly affected the
Ababa, Ethiopia; samuel_
abera@yahoo.com level of infant mortality rates.

CITATION Keywords: Infant mortality; multilevel; poverty; inequality
Zewdie SA and Adjiwanou V
(2017).
Multilevel analysis of infant
mortality and its risk factors 1. Introduction
in South Africa. International
Journal of Population Studies, Infant mortality rate is an important indicator of health and development. Biologically,
3(2): 43-56. infants have much weaker immune systems than adults and are therefore far more
doi: 10.18063/ijps.v3.i2.330
vulnerable to environmental or social complications (Caldwell, 1996). In addition, they
Copyright: © 2017 Zewdie SA are unable to care for themselves and are hence completely dependent on others. As a
and Adjiwanou V. This is an result, children are generally the group first and most strongly affected by poor living
Open Access article distributed
under the terms of the standards. Likewise, advances in health or social conditions are often first observed in
Creative Commons Attribution- improvements in infant or child mortality (Omran, 1971). Studies on infant mortality
NonCommercial 4.0 have accumulated a huge list of determinants or associates, including individual-
International License (http://
creativecommons.org/ and community-level factors such as maternal age, race, income, sanitation, water
licenses/by-nc/4.0/), permitting source, electricity, urban/rural residence, region of residence, household composition,
all noncommercial use, occupation, female education, access to health care, and so forth (Caldwell, 1979;
distribution, and reproduction
in any medium, provided the Hobcraft, McDonald and Rutstein, 1985; Kembo and Ginneken, 2009; Omariba,
original work is properly cited. Beaujot and Rajulton, 2007; Victora, Wagstaff, Schellenberg et al., 2003; Wang, 2003).

International Journal of Population Studies | 2017, Volume 3, Issue 2 43