Analysis of Repeated Measures of Weight of Children under Five Years, A Comperative Analysis between Male and Female Children (CASE STUDY: Tamale Metropolis)

Author(s): Abdul-Rahaman Haadi, Tuahiru Maahi

This paper 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.

Repeated measures, longitudinal data, feeding types, Anova, Manova

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