Health, psychology, economic resilience and wellbeing: Long-term effects on family welfare of early marriage

Abstract

Background: Early marriage is a social problem that can have various impacts. This study aims to determine the long-term impact of early marriage compared to adult marriage on the aspects of health, psychology, economic survival and welfare in a comprehensive manner. Methods: This study used a cross-sectional study design. The sampling unit for this study was early marriage families from 3 sub-districts in Ponorogo district, namely Sawoo, Ngrayun and Pulung. The number of samples used were 104 families. The variables in this study consisted of health, husband's psychology, wife's psychology, economic resilience and well-being. The analysis to construct composite variables was polychoricpca analysis. Results: The long-term effects of early marriage can be seen comprehensively using polychoric PCA analysis. Based on the polyuchoric PCA analysis, a composite variable was obtained, namely Maternal Health (λ=2.79; CE 0.35); Infant health (λ=2.23; CE 0.45); Wife's psychology (λ=6.78; CE 0.56); Husband's psychology (λ=5.59; CE 0.56); Wellbeing (λ=2.07; CE 0.30); Economic resilience (λ=1.60; CE 0.40). The results of this study indicate that the long-term impact of early marriage compared to adult marriage is on the poorer aspects of maternal health, poorer infant health, poorer wellbeing and worse Economic Resilience. Conclusions: There needs to be special monitoring of cases of early marriage, so that it will suppress the bad impact.