Modeling successive birth interval of women in Ethiopia: application of parametric shared frailty and accelerated failure time model

BACKGROUND: Both short and long birth intervals are associated with many risk factors and about 29% of births are short birth intervals in Ethiopia. The purpose of this study is to model the birth intervals of adult women aged 15–49 years using accelerated failure time and shared frailty models in order to analyze the birth intervals of Ethiopian women. METHODS: The data was obtained from the 2016 Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS). Accelerated failure time with different baseline and shared frailty models are used for the analysis to identify important demographic and socio-economic factors affecting the length of birth intervals and correlates of the birth intervals respectively. RESULTS: The data consists of 9147 women, of which about 7842 (85.5%) are closed interval and the rest of 1323(14.5%) are open interval. Accelerated failure time (AFT) result revealed that women education level, husbands education level, age at first birth, marital status, religion and family wealth index are significant factors affecting birth interval of women in Ethiopia. CONCLUSION: Women with closely spaced births tend to have larger family sizes when compared with women with longer inter-birth interval. Longer successive birth interval tends to reduce the total fertility rate of women. Furthermore, improvements in socio-economic status and level of education of women associate with reduced fertility, improved maternal and child wellbeing, and longer birth interval.