Freer Unions, More Complex Itineraries? Male Premarital Life In Rural Mali
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the increase in female age at marriage and the relaxing of family controls over couple formation, the conditions of entry into union and transition to adulthood are undergoing radical transformation in sub-Saharan Africa. Is this nuptiality transition also leading to greater complexity and diversity of union formation trajectories? We examine this hypothesis by studying long-term trends in male first marriage and premarital life in a rural population of Mali. The data are drawn from a population surveillance project that has been running for 25 years and which provides unique biographical data on premarital dynamics thanks to the detailed recording of all matrimonial procedures, whether or not they actually culminate in marriage. Two main findings qualify the initial hypothesis. First, the fragility and complexity of matrimonial processes is by no means recent; these are habitual and traditional characteristics of the matrimonial institution. Second, the general trend is towards a simplification and a standardization of male union formation trajectories. In the light of these findings, it would be useful to examine the characteristics of preconjugal dynamics and their evolution in other contexts. These dynamics, not covered in major surveys, provide valuable new insight into youth, marriage and the transition to adulthood.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".