The educational status of parents, and infant and child mortality in rural North India.

The task of this discussion is to disentangle the various forces which influence the probability of death for children and, where possible, to identify the independent role of education. This discussion is one of a series of explorations of the mortality and fertility experiences of a sample of couples from North India. The analysis is based on interviews with a rural sample of husbands and wives living in 120 villages in Uttar Pradesh State in India. Information concerning fertility and mortality is based on the retrospective fertility histories collected in 1972. The population is heavily dependent upon agriculture, and it is poor and has little formal education. Per capita income at the time of the survey was less than $100/year, and 52% of the husbands and 87% of the wives had never been to school. The crude birth rate is over 50/1000 and the total fertility rate is 7.7. The overall level of infant mortality in the uncorrected data is on the order of 170/1000 births. For the 2nd and 3rd years of life the mortality rate is 74/1000 children surviving the 1st year. There are considerable differences in the mortality experience of children according to the educational attainment of their parents. In general, the mortality differentials between those with no education and those with a moderate amount of education are small, but for all 3 measures of education, children with the most educated parents experience substantially lower levels of mortality. Those households where the mother has had some education tend to have lower female than male mortality rates, i.e., children of both sexes born into those households experience lower levels of mortality than do children born into households where neither parent or only the father is educated, but female children do particularly well. A clear measure of association between education and mortality is shown, but these measures are suggestive. To examine further the role of education as a determinant of mortality, the multivariate correlates of mortality in the neonatal and postneonatal periods are examined separately. In each case the determinants of death are examined in the context of a complex model of behavior. The regressions show a reasonably high degree of explanation of mortality during the 1st month of life, but education is not a significant explanatory variable in any of the regressions. In the multivariate context the influence of education in the postneonatal period is restricted to female births. Those girls born to households where the mother has received some education are significantly less likely to die than are the counterparts born to families where neither parent is educated or just the father has attended school. In sum, education is not a statistically significant predictor for the mortality probability of males in either age group, but it is a significant and robust predictor of female mortality in the postneonatal period.