Analysis of Repeated Measures of Weight of Children under Five Years, a Comparative Analysis between Male and Female Children (Case Study: Tamale Metropolis)
Loading...
Date
2012
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Repeated measures data has grown increasingly within the past years because of its ability to monitor changes both in within and between subjects. Statisticians in many field of study have chosen method of collecting data because it is cost effective and also minimizes the number of subjects required to produce a meaningful outcome. This thesis seeks to describe the use of several methods to analyze repeated measure using data collected on weight of children under five years of age at the weighing centers in Tamale metropolis in the northern region. The question of interest is to find out if there is a change in mean weight gain by children under five year over time and if the factors (age, feeding type, feeding practice gender etc) influence those changes. The data was collected from 210 children put into three groups of ages 0-6 months, 7-12 months and 13-18 months on monthly bases for a total of 1260 observations. Three feeding types: exclusive breast feeding, breast feeding with introduction of plumpy nut food supplement and completely complementary feeding. Univariate ANOVA and multivariate MANOVA techniques were use to analyzed the data. Both random effect and fixed effect models shown to be better for the data.
Age, feeding type and feeding practices were the factors that did not support the null hypothesis and therefore influencing the children weight gain with the p-values of <0.001 at 5% level in all the three cases. Gender of the children is not an influencing factor of weight gain by children. Other factors such as mother’s occupation, birth position of the children to their mothers and birth position were all tested negative to weight gain by the children.
Description
A Thesis Submitted to the Department of Mathematics, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy,