The proposed research will clarify and quantify the impact of breastfeeding on the infant's survival chances in third world countries and investigate expected contingencies of this impact on surrounding circumstances. Information on recent births to women interviewed in the World Fertility Surveys in approximately 14 countries will be used. Data will be subjected to extensive quality checks. Parallel intra-country analyses will be structured to deal appropriately with the problems of truncation and spurious causation which have rendered much research on this topic inconclusive. Briefly, survival to some specified age will be predicted, in a logistic regression framework, from breastfeeding experience up to some earlier cutoff age, for those surviving to that cutoff age. Predictors will also include other influences on survival per se, controls for likely common causes of breastfeeding and survival, and interaction terms between breastfeeding experience and variables thought to condition its impact. Strategies are also proposed for cross-national analysis.
| Millman, S R; Cooksey, E C (1987) Birth weight and the effects of birth spacing and breastfeeding on infant mortality. Stud Fam Plann 18:202-12 |
| Palloni, A; Tienda, M (1986) The effects of breastfeeding and pace of childbearing on mortality at early ages. Demography 23:31-52 |
