Measuring Independent and Controlled Effects of Age at First Marriage and Age at First Birth on Completed Family Size among Women Aged 45-49 in Zambia

Moyo Nkuye,Qiao Xiaochun,Zheng Xiaoying,Wu Jilei,Nanyangwe-Moyo Tina

doi:10.23937/2474-1353/1510135

Abstract

The link between age at marriage and first birth in explaining completed family size is not always direct, due to heterogeneity in circumstances, that compel individual women to marry or initiate childbearing at a particular age. We analyzed data for 1020 women aged 45-49 in 2014 of the 1965-1969 birth cohort from the 2013-14 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey (ZDHS).

Highlights

Marriage assumes diverse denotations in different settings
Upon performing crosstabulations of completed family size (CFS) and age at first birth, we found that all the missing data on age at first birth were due to 25 nulliparous women (2.45%)
Our findings indicate that the average CFS was 6.7 and the average age at first marriage for this cohort of women was 18.3 years (CI: 18.0-18.5) while the mean age at first birth was 18.9

Summary

Introduction

Marriage assumes diverse denotations in different settings. Needless to say, every society has some form of a system which regulates the formation of a family and, one salient attribute of the act of family formation - called marriage [1], is that, it founds the basic unit of the social structure. Marriage is an institution where sexual intercourse is sanctioned and childbearing permitted {Formatting Citation. Because of these two critical features, timing of entry into marriage, especially the age at which women first enter into a marital union becomes pivotal in measuring trends in fertility and patterns of completed family size (CFS) [1,2,3,4] and may hold greater sway in efforts to control fertility. The link between age at marriage and first birth in explaining completed family size is not always direct, due to heterogeneity in circumstances, that compel individual women to marry or initiate childbearing at a particular age. We analyzed data for 1020 women aged 4549 in 2014 of the 1965-1969 birth cohort from the 2013-14 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey (ZDHS)

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Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion