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01-04-2021 | Original Paper

Protestantism and Child Mortality in Brazil

Authors: Luan Vinicius Bernardelli, Michael A. Kortt, Ednaldo Michellon

Published in: Journal of Religion and Health | Issue 2/2021

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the association between Protestantism and child mortality for Brazil. This paper employs data from the 1991, 2000, and 2010 Brazilian censuses. The association between Protestantism and child mortality was estimated using a conventional negative binomial regression model for women between the age of 20 and 34 years. This paper finds that the death rate of children born to Protestant mothers is around 5% lower compared to non-Protestant mothers, even after controlling for an extensive array of demographic and social characteristics. When Protestants are split into ‘Traditional’ and ‘Pentecostal’ groups, we find that the child mortality rate is substantially lower for Traditional Protestants. Our study contributes to the literature by providing recent empirical results on the association between child mortality and Protestantism in Brazil.

Table 2 presents the mean child mortality for women between the age of 20 and 34 years. The child mortality rate per 1000 births can, however, be estimated by using the following equation: \(\left( {\hat{M}/{\text{born}}} \right)1000\).

To address the ‘conversion of timing’ issue, we followed the approach by Wood et al. (2007) and restricted our analysis to only those women between the age of 20 and 24 years. Our results (not shown, but available upon request) were consistent with our original findings (i.e., a larger and statistically significant coefficient for Traditional Protestants).

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Title: Protestantism and Child Mortality in Brazil
Authors: Luan Vinicius Bernardelli
Michael A. Kortt
Ednaldo Michellon
Publication date: 01-04-2021
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Journal of Religion and Health / Issue 2/2021
Print ISSN: 0022-4197
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6571
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-020-01149-7

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