Nayyar Abbas, Irum Shaikh, Imran Bari
Introduction: There are many socio-economic and demographic variables such as (education level of parents, age at marriage, present age of women, parity of women, age differences between spouses, family income, son preference, gender relations, family planning education, infant mortality, sex of the previous child, survival status of previous child) which plays a momentous role in birth spacing.
Methods: For this study the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2006-2007 to find the relationship of these factors with birth interval. This study uses simple median of months of succeeding (subsequent) birth intervals for analyses and assessment of birth spacing practices.
Results: We have found that in younger women interval between births are longer than older women, also women with secondary and higher education and those belong to urban areas tend to space birth more widely. Employed couple get interval for first birth between 27-31 mean months. While if the couple is unemployed then interval going to decrease between 27-29 months. There is no signifcant difference between the employed and unemployed women. In this data the interesting point is to be noted that non-user of more and contraceptives has longer interval then users.
Conclusions: The study found that socio-economic and demographic variables on birth interval are showing almost same results on all birth order seven by using median (month intervals),do not show any signifcant results. This could be because of data limitations as data in Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS) is collected birth-to-birth and not pregnancy-to-pregnancy so they do not take into account if there were any wastage of pregnancy or miscarriages.(Pak J Public Health 2013; 3(2): 35-39
Open Access
