Determinants of Female Age At First Marriage in Jordan.

Abstract

The main concerns of this study are: (1) identification of some critical determinants of female age at first marriage in Jordan, and (2) explanation of the effects of these determinants within the framework of two conceptual models for urban and rural areas. While the urban model uses individual-level explanatory variables, the rural model includes both micro and macrovariables. The macrovariables are based on single villages or pairs of villages referred to as communities. The data are from the individual and household schedules of the 1976 Jordan Fertility Survey, which are of reasonably good quality, especially with respect to age at marriage. In urban Jordan, wife's education and prenuptial work experience are of paramount importance in explaining the variations in her marriage age among all cohorts of ever-married women, followed by religion. The strength of the net effects of these variables generally declines by age, but the effect of work is strong in the oldest cohort. The rural subsample is split into two groups: nonmigrants and migrants. Nonmigrants are rural women with rural childhoods, and migrants are rural women with urban or desert childhoods (mainly urban). Testing the rural model shows that: (1) wife's education and prenuptial work are significant predictors of her age at first marriage except where either of them basically does not vary, as is the case of education among nonmigrants. (2) Although community membership is considerably more important than microvariables in predicting age at marriage among both migrants and nonmigrants, its contribution to the explained variance is modest. Furthermore, I have not been able to capture all inter-community differences in marriage age with aggregate variables. However, there is some evidence that the more heavily agricultural and the highly illiterate villages promote earlier female marriages. Other important contributing factors to village differences in marriage age are thought to be local traditions regarding female marriage age as well as some missing microvariables.Ph.D.DemographyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/159731/1/8402275.pd