Changing Patterns in Men’s First Marriage among the Sereer in Rural Senegal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As marriage behaviour is often related to fertility patterns in many African societies, it is essential to identify the components of and the changes affecting nuptiality regimes. Because oftheir key position as decision-makers within the family, men generally control marriage processes. Using qualitative and quantitative data, we investigate in detail men’s first marriage in a rural area in Senegal. We show that young men tend to start their marriage process informally and delay the celebration for economic reasons. Different patterns are identified with their respective implications regarding the start of the couples’ sexual and reproductive life. Today men perceive that the onset ofconjugal life starts earlier but the statistics do not support this finding. We show that these results are not contradictory with each other and are related to the changes in the traditional markers ofmen’s entry into adulthood. Hence, these findings refer to different dimensions of the same process: precise events in time (ceremonies, payments) and more diffuse perceptions ofthe stages in the marriage process that lead to a legitimate union (negotiations).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".