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How are Mothers Faring across the Globe? Constructing a new Mothers’ Well-Being Index and Assessing Its Validity

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Abstract

This paper proposes a new index of mothers’ well-being for cross-country comparison. Conceptually, maternal health and the social protection and autonomy of mothers are two distinct dimensions at issue. In operationalization, maternal health is indicated by 1) prevalence of modern contraception, 2) low adolescent fertility; and 3) low maternal mortality. Social protection and autonomy of the mothers comprises (1) skilled attendants at delivery; (2) age at first marriage; and (3) maternal protection policy. The results from structural equation modeling show that a one-factor model is as good as a two-factor model for constructing the Mothers’ Well-being Index (MWI). The MWI’s internal validity and predictive validity are both satisfactory. We calculated the scores for each country and present the ranking of 150 countries for 2010. The mothers in Nordic and Western European countries fared best, and mothers from African countries fared worst. Countries located in the middle of the ranking list should be given more attention because their relative ranking can be contingent on the choice of measures in index construction.

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Notes

  1. The original data are available upon request.

  2. In generating the index, we first obtained a standard score by (x – minimum score) / (maximum score- minimum score) for each element, and calculated an average score from the six elements, as their scales are now the same. The figures showed on Table 2 are rounded to the thousandth. For countries with the same rounded scores (for instance, Finland and Switzerland), we rank them using their original scores.

  3. Save the Children (2013) provides the first ranking with high- and low-income countries pooled together. It is used for comparison with ours. The Mothers’ Index of 2013 is based on information from various years between 2010 and 2013 (Save the Children 2013:70–74), rather than using elements from the same year.

  4. Recent research argues that democracy can be a factor in improving the well-being of children, because it increases stability of state regime and reduce violations of human rights, particularly in developing countries (Wullert and Williamson 2016). However, our preliminary analysis using a measure from the Polity Project (Marshall et al. 2016) did not find it influential. We decided to not include the democracy variable in further estimation.

  5. We obtained 142 countries in the following analysis, due to missing information on explanatory variables.

  6. For the ridge traces of columns 1–3, see the upper panel of Appendix Table; for those of column 4–6, see the lower panel.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, 128, Sec. 2, Academia Road, Taipei, 11529, Taiwan

    Ming-Chang Tsai

  2. Department of Sociology, National Taipei University, 151, University Road, Sansia, New Taipei City, 23741, Taiwan

    Tsui-o Tai

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  1. Ming-Chang Tsai
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  2. Tsui-o Tai
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Correspondence to Ming-Chang Tsai.

Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 3
figure 3

Ridge traces from the modeling of the infant and under-5 mortality

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Tsai, MC., Tai, To. How are Mothers Faring across the Globe? Constructing a new Mothers’ Well-Being Index and Assessing Its Validity. Applied Research Quality Life 13, 647–670 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-017-9550-7

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