Child disability, parental self-rated health and food security : a multivariate cross-sectional analysis

Shahtahmasebi, Said and Emerson, Eric and Berridge, Damon and Lancaster, Gillian (2009) Child disability, parental self-rated health and food security : a multivariate cross-sectional analysis. International Journal on Disability and Human Development, 8 (4). pp. 417-434. ISSN 2191-0367

Abstract

The literature on child disability reports differentials in health and socio-economic outcomes between families with child disability and families without child disability. Often based on bivariate or descriptive multivariate analysis of survey data the relationship between child disability, health and poverty is extended to other social and health outcomes such as stress, mental health. In this paper, these relationships are re-examined within a statistical modelling framework. In other words, in examining the relationship between health outcomes and child disability the modelling process allows control for other variables. In particular, three models are fitted to a large secondary data set for the three outcomes, health, poverty, and child disability. This approach can be very instructive in an exploratory study in identifying spurious relationships. The results suggest that after controlling for multicollinearity far fewer variables appear to be associated with health, child disability and food security outcomes; child disability appears to be related to health or food security but health or food security do not appear to be related to child disability i.e. none of the child disability variables appeared significant in model of health or poverty. Furthermore, the analysis highlights complex inter-relationships in data possibly due to the dynamic nature of these processes and the definition and measurement of these outcomes.