The Association between Age at Marriage and Child Mortality in Bangladesh

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to show the association between age at marriage and the early stage neonatal mortality in Bangladesh. The secondary data has been used for this paper and the data source is Bangladesh Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. The target group of respondents in this study were the ever married women and who had ever given birth. The total sample size was 44207. In this paper both univariate and bivariate analysis have been used and some graphical representation has also been applied. At bivariate level, to find out the association between dependent variable and independent variables chi square test has been applied. Here dependent variable is considered as early stage neo-natal mortality (child who ever breathed or cried or showed other signs of life-even if he/she lived only a few minutes or hours) which is a binary variable indicating 1 if early stage neo-natal mortality is occurred and 0 if early stage neonatal mortality is not occurred among the respondents. Results show that among the respondents around 16.52 percent experienced very early stage neonatal mortality of their children and this percentage of early stage neonatal mortality for the women who got married at age 18 and above is 22.58 and this figure is 25.96 percent for the women who got married before reaching age 18 and this difference is statistically significant at 5 percent level of significance. So from this study it has been found that age at marriage has a significant role on early stage neonatal mortality in Bangladesh.