Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-122). / The purpose of this study was to measure health inequity amongst a cohort of HIV positive mother-child pairs in South Africa with a focus on the relationship between household socio-economic status and child health outcomes. This study is a secondary analysis to a prospective cohort study of mothers and infants participating in three of the eighteen national PMTCT sites in South Africa. Women (and their infants) were recruited prior to, or at the time of delivery and followed until the infants were 36 weeks of age. Three sites were purposefully sampled in order to reflect different socio-economic regions, rural-urban locations and my prevalence rates. The study made use of principal component analysis (PCA) to measure household socio-economic status. The selection of both variables that are indicators of socio-economic status and the use of PCA as a technique of assigning of weights to the chosen indicators of socio-economic status was informed by the literature. The selection of health outcomes was based on the renewed focus on child health. This study is organized in five chapters. The first chapter provides the rationale for measuring inequities in child health with particular focus on South Africa and states the aim and objectives. Chapter Two reviews different forms of literature that were pertinent in understanding the importance of child health, the current state of child health and the relationship between inequities and poor child health outcomes. Chapter Three gives a detailed discussion of the data collection and quality control methods employed to achieve good quality data in the primary study. Then it discusses choosing indicators of socio-economic status and intricacies involved in measuring socio-economic status. In addition, it outlines the chosen child health outcomes, motivation for their choice and their measurement.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/9461 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Nkonki, Lungiswa Leonora |
| Contributors | Thiede, Michael |
| Publisher | University of Cape Town, Faculty of Health Sciences, Health Economics Unit |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MPH |
| Format | application/pdf |
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