An Assessment of Association between Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status and Infant Mortality in High Focus States in India

Ashish Kumar Gupta,Laishram Ladusingh

doi:10.4236/health.2016.87066

Abstract

Neighbourhood characteristics influence infant mortality above and beyond individual/household factors. In India, there are very few studies discussing the effects of neighbourhood characteristics on infant mortality. This study examined the effect of neighbourhood socioeconomic characteristics on infant mortality using data from the India’s Third District Level Household Survey conducted in 2007-2008. Multilevel analyses applied on the representative sample of 168,625 nested within 14,193 communities using MCMC procedure. Results established that place of residence, neighbourhood socio-economic factors as important determinants of infant mortality. Overall, being born in affluent (OR: 0.79, p < 0.01), more educated (OR: 0.86, p < 0.01) and socially disadvantaged caste (OR: 0.83, p < 0.01) neighbourhood was associated with the significant reduction in hazards of infant death. The finding of this study suggests that effort should be made to reduce infant mortality in these high focus states by including policies which aim at improving infant survival in the neighbourhood that is economically and socially deprived.

Highlights

Infant and child mortality in India has declined from 80 deaths per thousand live births in the 1990’s to 40 inHow to cite this paper: Gupta, A.K. and Ladusingh, L. (2016) An Assessment of Association between Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status and Infant Mortality in High Focus States in India
Multilevel analyses applied on the representative sample of 168,625 nested within 14,193 communities using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedure the results of the null model (Model-I) showed a significant variation in infant mortality (Table 2) at child/mother- and neighborhood-levels
As indicated by the proportional change in variance (PCV) in Model-III in Table 2, 11.86 and 17.39 of the variance in the risks of infant mortality across individual and community levels respectively were attributed to child and mother level variables

Summary

Introduction

Infant and child mortality in India has declined from 80 deaths per thousand live births in the 1990’s to 40 inHow to cite this paper: Gupta, A.K. and Ladusingh, L. (2016) An Assessment of Association between Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status and Infant Mortality in High Focus States in India. How to cite this paper: Gupta, A.K. and Ladusingh, L. (2016) An Assessment of Association between Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status and Infant Mortality in High Focus States in India. One plausible explanation for the unsatisfactory decline of Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) may be related to disparities in health, contextual factors and social conditions across state/districts/communities [6]. Empirical examination of trend and pattern of IMR across the states reveals that, there are a few states with unacceptably high fertility and mortality indicators. These states, appropriately designated as “high-focus” states by the government of India, comprise Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Assam covers large part of the India. The progress under this programme has been significant in improving the overall health status of children, the improvement is not uniform across the subgroups of population [8]

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