Marriage and entry into parenthood.

Abstract

The purpose of this cross country comparison was to describe differences and similarities in marital status marital stability never married populations and age at first marriage and first birth. This information is useful in policy formulation at the interval level and for identifying groups with special needs. Data was obtained from the Demographic and Health Surveys. Ample numbers of charts and tables supplement the text such as marital status by 5-year age groups for 37 countries marital status by urban and rural residence and country extent of polygynous unions by country and 5-year age groups marital stability by level of education and median age at first marriage in 5-year age groups and country. The conclusions were that in 37 developing countries the average age of marriage occurred before the age of 20 years with the birth of the first child shortly thereafter. In most countries women married only once; in the Dominican Republic Ghana and Liberia women married more than once by a factor of 1 to 3. Marriage age tended to be younger for rural women and women with less education. Polygynous unions were still common in West Africa. Childbearing occurred regardless of marriage in many places: there were 20% of never married women with a birth in 7 countries. The trend in many countries is for younger cohorts to marry later and have their first birth later than older cohorts: in North Africa; parts of Sub-Saharan Africa excluding Burundi Mali and Niger; the Asian countries of Indonesia Sri Lanka and Thailand; and the South American countries of Colombia the Dominican Republic Peru and Trinidad and Tobago. There were clear cases of the inadequacies of measuring marriage patterns for Botswana and Namibia countries where there are a range of sexual unions. More meaningful questions pertained to patterns of sexual behavior and age at initiation of sexual relations. Differences in the proportions never married explain the variation by country to the proportion in union. Differences also reflected age at first marriage.

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