We focus on individual women in order to examine the correlates of individual cases.
The unit of analysis is a birthing to a specific mother. ‘Mother’ means a particular woman in her first marriage, and ‘birthing’ means one of a series of birthings to that mother, in that marriage. At each such birthing, a mother has a known or estimated age, a known parity, and we know whether either she or her current husband is in a first or later marriage.24 The parish, date of birth, date of marriage, and other ancillary data are also known. The outcome variable is whether or not the mother died within sixty days of the index birth. The tool employed is logistic regression.25 We follow a parallel approach in analysing background mortality, that is, deaths to parturient women 61—730 days after birthing.
6.1