Frailty Approach to Age at First Birth in Uttar Pradesh-India

Abstract

In Indian State of Uttar-Pradesh, there is always pressure among newly-wed to conceive early and have births. Research studies have documented relationship between age at first birth & fertility, besides the socio-demographic factors that influence them. Study aims answering such relationships by the use of frailty models. Indian fertility is characterized as too-early-too-fast. By age-30 majority women would have completed the childbearing. Forty percent of the women had first birth below 18 while 95% experienced before reaching age 26. Births at younger age are reflection on poor enforcement of child-marriage restraint act-18 for girls & 21 for boys. The data is from NFHS-3[3]. The frailty model capturing the unobserved heterogeneity in the event time is preferred over the standard survival models. For the current study, inverse Gaussian with log-logistic baseline-hazard is used, as it fits the data well. Age at marriage and women’s literacy significantly determines the Age at First Birth. The model also predicts significant frailty with variance parameter 0.11