Women's Marital Experiences Following Premarital Fertility in <scp>Sub‐Saharan</scp> Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objective The aim of the study was to offer a descriptive overview of the stability and quality of marriages formed by women following premarital fertility in contemporary sub‐Saharan Africa. Background Premarital sex and fertility rates are high in many sub‐Saharan African countries, yet we know little about how premarital childbirth, or even premarital conception, corresponds with women's subsequent marital outcomes. For instance, it is unknown whether premarital fertility is associated with forming unions that are less stable, polygynous, or more violent. Method We analyze Demographic and Health Survey data for 25 sub‐Saharan African countries to describe women's marital experiences following a premarital pregnancy or premarital birth (relative to marital pregnancy and birth). We estimate country‐specific, two‐stage Heckman probit models to understand whether, conditional on having married, premarital pregnancy or premarital birth is associated with union instability, and among women currently married, polygyny and intimate partner violence. Results In most countries, unions following a premarital pregnancy or premarital birth were less stable relative to unions in which pregnancy occurred only after marriage. Premarital births were also associated with a higher likelihood of entering a polygynous union, especially in West and Central African countries, as well as a greater likelihood of being in a physically violent union, particularly in East and Southern African countries. Conclusion The associations between premarital fertility and women's subsequent marital experiences raise questions about the broader health and life course implications for the women and children involved.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".