Center on Gender Equity and Health, University of California San Diego, 9100 Gilman Dr, La Jolla, CA, USA.
San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Dr, San Diego, CA, 92182, USA.
BMC Public Health. 2020 May 19;20(1):729. doi: 10.1186/s12889-020-08759-6.
Niger has the highest prevalence of child marriage in the world. While child marriage in Niger is clearly normative in the sense that it is commonly practiced, the social and contextual factors that contribute to it are still unclear.
Here, we tested the importance of village-level factors as predictors of young age at marriage for a group of married adolescent girls (N = 1031) in the Dosso district of rural Niger, using multi-level and geographic analyses. We aggregated significant individual level factors to determine whether, independent of a girl's own sociodemographic characteristics, the impact of each factor is associated at the village level. Finally, we tested for spatial dependence and heterogeneity in examining whether the village-level associations we find with age at marriage differ geographically.
The mean age of marriage for girls in our study was 14.20 years (SD 1.8). Our statistical results are consistent with other literature suggesting that education is associated with delayed marriage, even among adolescent girls. Younger ages at marriage are also associated with a greater age difference between spouses and with a greater likelihood of women being engaged in agricultural work. Consistent with results at the individual level, at the village level we found that the proportion of girls who do agricultural work and the mean age difference between spouses were both predictive of a lower age at marriage for individual girls. Finally, mapping age at marriage at the village level revealed that there is geographical variation in age at marriage, with a cluster of hot spots in the Hausa-dominated eastern area where age at marriage is particularly low and a cluster of cold spots in the Zarma-dominated western areas where age at marriage is relatively high.
Our findings suggest that large-scale approaches to eliminating child marriage in these communities may be less successful if they do not take into consideration geographically and socially determined contextual factors at the village level.
尼日尔是世界上儿童婚姻率最高的国家。虽然在尼日尔，儿童婚姻普遍存在，显然是一种规范，但促成这种现象的社会和背景因素仍不清楚。
在这里，我们使用多水平和地理分析方法，测试了村庄层面因素对农村多索区 1031 名已婚少女初婚年龄的重要性。我们将显著的个体层面因素进行汇总，以确定无论女孩自身的社会人口特征如何，每个因素的影响是否与村庄层面相关。最后，我们测试了空间依赖性和异质性，以检查我们发现的与初婚年龄相关的村庄层面关联在地理上是否存在差异。
我们研究中女孩的平均初婚年龄为 14.20 岁（标准差为 1.8）。我们的统计结果与其他文献一致，表明教育与晚婚有关，即使是在少女中也是如此。初婚年龄越小，配偶之间的年龄差距越大，女性从事农业劳动的可能性也越大。与个体层面的结果一致，在村庄层面，我们发现从事农业劳动的女孩比例和配偶之间的平均年龄差异都可以预测个体女孩的初婚年龄较低。最后，在村庄层面绘制初婚年龄图显示，初婚年龄存在地理差异，在豪萨语主导的东部地区有一个热点集群，初婚年龄特别低，而在扎马语主导的西部地区有一个冷点集群，初婚年龄相对较高。
我们的研究结果表明，如果不考虑村庄层面的地理和社会决定的背景因素，在这些社区中采取大规模的方法消除童婚可能不太成功。
