Impact of household structure on child vaccination in India

Sumoni Mukherjee, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)

Previous studies show that presence of others in the household decreases the utilization of health care services, especially when mothers are engaged with cash earning. This paper examines how household structure with women earning for cash is differentiate child immunization in India, where joint family is the traditional and predominance norm using the third round of National Family Health Survey data. Both bivariate and multivariate techniques had used to understand the study objective in India and selected states, where women earn money more than the national level. Results show that non-nuclear households have great impact (positive) on the vaccination of children than nuclear households. It is also observed that the non-nuclear household is more important than cash earning of mother. Children live in non-nuclear households are more likely to be vaccinated than children from nuclear households irrespective of whether their mothers are earning cash or non-cash.