Non-medical determinants of caesarean deliveries using logistic regression

The non-medical factors that influence expectant mothers to odecide for caesarean deliveries in Ghana were examined. Data on 395 expectant mothers across the ten regions of Ghana, located in urban, semi-rural and rural areas, and spanned a period of five years (2012 to 2016) were obtained from the Ghana Health Service.

In fitting the logistic regression model, data on 355 expectant mothers (i.e. 89.9% of the data) was assigned to the analysis sample while 40 (i.e. 10.1%) was assigned to the hold-out sample. The hold-out sample together with other statistical measures of overall model fit, pseudo R^2 measures and classification accuracy were used to validate the results obtained from the analysis sample. Significance was tested at P=0.05.

Determinants including, educational level of expectant mother, parity of expectant mother, baby’s birth weight, previous caesarean delivery, location of expectant mother, age of expectant mother and, period within the year of childbirth had a significant effect on caesarean delivery.