The Effect of Women’s Individual Level Fertility on Their Children’s stunting in Bangladesh

Women’s individual level fertility is a major public health concern and is recognized as a serious problem of women’s human in our country. The nutritional status of children is a sensitive indicator of a country’s socioeconomic characteristics as well as demographic characteristics. The research work used Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2011 (BDHS 2011) data. Therefore, using secondary data from 2011 BDHS surveys, this study attempted to reveal the effect of individual level fertility on children’s stunting in Bangladesh. In this study, some socioeconomic and demographic variables like mother’s education level, father’s education level, father’s occupation, wealth status, sex of child, age of child, mother age, mothers currently pregnant, preceding birth interval, place of residence and region were used. In this study, ANOVA F-test shows that there exists strong positive association with stunting between two continuous variables number of siblings and child age (in months). For this study purpose univariate analysis was used for frequency distribution of individual variables. Then bivariate and multivariate analyses were performed to identify the determinants of child nutritional status.