Latitudinally

Modeling the Effect of Contraceptives and Culture on Marriage Prevalence

Arithmomaniac June 4, 2012

This work is under the CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 US License

Introduction Over the past fifty years, the prevalence of married couples has been falling across the rich world. For example, in the United States, a country with relatively high marriage prevalence, only 52% of adults were married in 2010, down from 72% in 1960 (Pew Social Trends, 2010). In contrast, marriage in the developing world is relatively stable (United Nations. 2009). As married households have been linked to many positive outcomes in child development, socioeconomic status, and physical health (Ribar, 2004), understanding and mitigating marriages decline has become increasingly important for policymakers in America and elsewhere. Despite over 35 years of research, there is still no consensus as to the cause of this trend. This may be partly due to the longitudinal, America-based nature of almost all of these studies. It is possible that there are too many changes in social and economic inputs over the past 50 years to isolate any of them. In addition, without reference to other countries, circumstances unique to America may have a large interaction effect with other inputs. The goal of this paper is to measure the impact and cultural sensitivity of birth control on womens marriage rates, using cross-country latitudinal comparisons to circumvent the above weaknesses. First, I will test whether current rates of contraception have an effect on the prevalence of marriage in different age brackets. Then, I will test if predominately Muslim societies react differently to increased contraceptive use than non-Muslim ones. Success of the first test would reinforce the argument that contraceptives are an important input, while success of the second would indicate that culture may have an effect on the effectiveness of socioeconomic inputs. Regardless of the outcome, the method itself may be a valuable addition to the current methodology.

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Literature Review A Pew Social and Demographics Trend survey (Pew, 2010) provides a good overview of the changes in marriage in America. The trend in marriage behavior is straightforward: Adults are marrying later and less often, and cohabitation is on the rise. Yet the attitudes towards and reasons for this change are ambiguous. Most unmarried Americans, including cohabiters, want to get married, but think it is acceptable not to. The richer and more educated are more likely to marry, more likely to cohabit, and yet less likely to think marriage is important. Hard-to-interpret surveys like these have led researchers to build inductive theories instead. Becker (1981) pioneered this approach with his formal model of marriage formation. In it, marriages are primarily economic constructs, in which the husband and wife raise children more efficiently by engaging in specialization of labor. Becker predicted that as womens rising wages made domestic specialization less attractive, and as fertility rates continued to fall, marriage would fade into irrelevance. This model has a large following (Loh, 2009), so researchers normally criticize it before proposing an alternative. For example, Oppenheimer (1994) begins his piece by noting that current marriage prevalence maps to centuries-long trends, rather than being a new phenomenon. He also notes that richer people are more likely to marry, and contends that much of what is categorized as non-marriage is actually delayed marriage. If anything is driving marriage rates lower, Oppenheimer asserts, it is economic insecurity caused by stagnating mens wages. This is the most popular alternative to Beckers model (Bolick, 2011). Engelen and Puschmann (2011) argue that the pre-1940 and contemporary trends are not comparable. In the 19th century West, women were delaying and avoiding marriage because

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industrialization made having eight children unaffordable, and the lack of birth control made celibacy the best option. Today, however, people arent marrying precisely because premarital sex is tolerated. Neither of these reasons, however, explains falling marriage rates in the Muslim world, where contraceptives are widely used, yet there is little premarital sex. Engelen and Puschmann suggest that increased education and rights for women are driving a delay, but not abandonment, of marriage in the Muslim world. Stevenson and Wolfers (2007) think contraceptive availability has a net negative effect on marriage, despite the control it gives married couples. Before modern contraceptives, women faced a choice between celibacy, marriage, or embarrassing premarital births. The pill made premarital sex possible, which in turn caused a shift in social norms that outweighed the increased palatability of marriage. Uniquely, they used cross-country data, arguing that the United States low relative rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock children indicate that this social adjustment will continue in America as it converges with patterns in Europe.

Hypotheses As most causal mechanisms focus on the female decisions about marriage about marriage, I focus on womens marriage patterns. While all of the causes cited in the literature review are worth studying, I focus on testing Stevenson and Wolferss model, combined with Engelen and Puschmanns observations on Muslim countries. 1) On the country level, use of birth control is negatively correlated with prevalence of

marriage among women, especially among the young.

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2)

On the country level, the effect of birth control on marriage prevalence weakens with an

increased relative presence of Muslims in society. The overall causal mechanism would follow Stevenson and Wolferss reasoning: prevalence of birth control causes a loosening of sexual norms, both removing marriage as a prerequisite to sex and weakening the idea of marriage as an ideal arrangement. Yet if this is so, this effect should be weaker in Muslim communities, where pro-marriage taboos and attitudes are stronger and more uniform than in those of many other faiths. Thus, an increased prevalence of Muslims would weaken the aggregate effect on the country.

Data and Method Due to the constraints on available individual-level data, countries are used as the units of analysis instead. Each indicator is best understood as either a numeric representation of a societal norm, a probability for a woman from that country, or some combination of both. For example, the labor-force sex ratio reflects both attitudes towards womens roles and the probable employment status of a randomly selected woman. I will address this ambiguity, and possible ecological fallacies, in the conclusion; but it is a reasonably robust method that has been used in several of the longitudinal studies cited above. The population consists of the worlds countries and autonomous regions, as defined by the UN, in the year 2000. As this population has only about 230 members, no probability sampling is required. However, removing countries with missing variable data resulted in a sample size of 107, skewed towards developed and against small (population < 1,000,000) ones.

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The data set itself is a three-way merge of the UN World Populations World Marriage 2008 report, the World Religion Database, and the World Bank World Development Indicators (the latter being the source for all non-marriage, non-religion data). First, the UN data was filtered to only include countries with statistics between 1996 and 2004. If a country had multiple data points, then preference was given to more rigorous collection methods, proximity to the year 2000, and years preceding 2000, in that order. This data was then merged with the WRD data, which was only available for the year 2000. The combined data set was then merged with the WDI data on the basis of the marriage datas country and the year; if a WDI statistic for a country did not exist for that year, data was filled in from other years of the data, with preference given to data from 1995-2005, from nearby years, and from earlier years, in that order. This is an acceptable approximation, as these statistics change slowly. Counties were renamed to facilitate the merges, and Countries with null data for any desired variables were excluded. The basic model is as follows, organized by variable type: Dependent Baseline Independent Control Interaction (PrctMarried) = + 1(PrctFemale) + 2(PrctUrban) + 3(PrctOnContraceptives) + 4(WorkforceSexRatio) + 5(HSSexRatio) + 6(PrctMuslim) + 7(PrctMuslim)*(PrctOnContraceptives)

Some more information on these variables: PrctMarried: Percentage of women in an age cohort married. This number includes

customary unions, unregistered marriages that are common in Latin America. A separate regression was run for the 20-24, 25-29, 30-34 and 35-39-year-old age cohorts; this automatically controls for countries age distribution, and variation between different age cohorts makes it possible to isolate delayed marriage from non-marriage. Page 5

PrctFemale: The percentage of the countrys population that is female. A surplus of

women will mean that less of them can get married. PrctUrban: The percentage of a countrys population that lives in urban areas.

Oppenheimer notes that while children are normally economic assets in rural areas, they are liabilities in urban ones. Becker, Stevenson, and Wolfers further note that rural households are much more dependent on domestic labor. Urbanization would thus lead to a disincentive to marry and have children. PrctOnContraceptives: The percentage of married women (ages 15-45) on

contraceptives. For countries with PrctOnContraceptives above 30%, this is a very good indicator of availability, as total demand for contraceptives is almost always between 60-80% of all married women not seeking children. Almost all of the exceptions are in sub-Saharan Africa, where PrctOnContraceptives is below 30%, yet total demand is below 50%. This anomaly needs further study, but at such low levels of availability, it is possible that women dont even consider them an option. If so, PrctOnContraceptives would indicate low availability for them, too. PrctMuslim: The percentage of residents of a country who are Muslim. To ensure this

measurement was standardized against a known quantity, this is measured as a percentage of residents either Muslim, Christian, atheist/agnostic, or ethnoreligionist. The percentage of people thus dropped is reported in the descriptive-summary table; in the rare cases when this was greater than 35%, that country was dropped from the analysis. WorkforceSexRatio: The relative prevalence of women in the labor force, measured as the

labor-participation rate of women as a percentage of that of men. This simultaneously controls

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for Beckers theory that work is a disincentive to domestic specialization, and Oppenheimers theory that women are dissatisfied with stagnating male employment. HSSexRatio: Similarly, the relative prevalence of women in secondary school. At the

simplest level, women dont marry while they are in school, and high school attendance is highly correlated with tertiary school attendance (R = .6576). More generally, this is a good indicator of government gender equality and overall socioeconomic empowerment, both of which Engelen and Puschmann cite as causes of marriage delay and decline. Originally, my model included womens life expectancy and GDP per capita as baseline variables. However, both of these are at least partially driven by other variables in the model, such as being a post-agricultural country, universal education, and a broad labor force. In order to avoid excessive collinearity, the two variables had to be excluded. Table 1 contains the descriptive statistics and expected beta direction of each variable. Most notable is the decreasing variability in marriage prevalence at older ages, and the roughly binary distribution of Muslim prevalence in a country. Table 2 shows the Pearson correlation table between the variables, rearranged to show correlations between independent variables separately. Marriage rates at different cohorts are unsurprisingly correlated, but less so when the age gap is larger. As our model expects, there is a moderate positive correlation between PrctMuslim and marriage rates, and a large negative one between PrctOnContraceptives and both PrctMuslim and marriage rates. (These relationships are plotted in Charts 1-5; Charts 3-5 are hard to interpret visually, due to PctMuslims polarized nature.) However, PrctOnContraceptives is positively correlated, and PrctMuslim negatively

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correlated, with HSSexRatio, itself a variable negatively correlated with marriage. Thus, regressions are necessary to observe the strength of the direct effect.

Result As Table 3 shows, there is little collinearity in the full model, asides from that caused by the presence of the interaction variable. However, my model suffers from major heteroskedasticity (Chiquare as high as 20 for some regressions), so robust regressions models were computed instead. The unequal yet polarized distribution of PrctMuslim is probably the primary culprit, though relatively low outliers also skew the sex ratio statistics. To test my hypotheses, three regression models were calculated for each age bracket. Briefly, Model A tests hypothesis 1 with a regression on the baseline variables and contraceptive use, while Model B ensures Model A reports true correlations by controls. Finally, Model C tests hypothesis 2 by adding our Muslim/contraceptive interaction variable to Model B. The resulting regressions tables can be found in Table 4. Hypothesis 1 was that countries with high uses of birth control would see lower marriage rates, especially among the young. Model A tests this using the baseline variables and PrctOnContraceptives, and appears to confirm this hypothesis with a large, age-dependent, and highly significant negative correlation between contraceptives and marriage prevalence (3 = .35 for PrctMarried-20, -.108 for PrctMarried-35; P < .001 for both). However, in Model B, where the control variables HSSexRatio and WorkforceSexRatio are included, the strength of the correlation is halved no longer statistically significant (3 = -.15, P = .111 for PrctMarried-20; 3

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= -.032, P = .371 for PrctMarried-35). It appears that most, if not all, of the effects of contraceptives on marriage formation are due to a parallel increase in womens education. Hypothesis 2 was that this negative correlation would be muted in more Muslim countries. Model C tests this by adding the interaction term PrctMuslim * PrctOnContraceptives and testing whether its coefficient is negative. In fact, the model found that the coefficient was positive (7 = .21 for PrctMarried-20, .051 for PrctMarried-35) that, on the contrary, the effects of birth control are stronger in Muslim countries. However, the coefficient was also statistically insignificant (P = .303 for PrctMarried-20, .399 for PrctMarried-35), so it did not outright disprove my hypothesis. No statistically significant direct correlation was found for PrctMuslim either, but its introduction pushed 3, and thus hypothesis 1, closer to statistical significance.

Conclusion In this paper, I sought to use cross-country latitudinal data to determine whether increased birth control and attendant changes in culture are causing widespread decreases in marriage. My hypothesis was that countries with higher rates of contraceptive use would indeed have lower marriage prevalence, yet that this effect is weaker in countries with many Muslims, a socially conservative religion. My regression failed to support either hypothesis, instead suggesting that urbanization and womens education are the biggest drivers of non-marriage. Incidentally, it also suggests that womens relative labor participation is also unimportant. Given the ambiguity in pre-existing literature on the relationship between womens education and marriage, I was quite surprised by the magnitude and significance of a negative

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correlation with HSSexRatio. It may be that the direct effect of education is indeed insignificant on balance, but that it has a strong effect on contraceptive use. In fact, this may explain a large portion of the effect of PrctUrban, too; past research has shown that in sub-Saharan Africa, urban or better-educated women have better instruction about and access to contraceptives, and use them more frequently (Ainsworth, Beegle, and Nyamete, 1996). The Pearson coefficients lend some support to this idea; while not strongly correlated with each other (R = .4585), both variables are highly correlated with PrctOnContraceptives (R = .68 for both). Yet further research suggests that the ambiguity in the literature may be merely an artifact of post-war American analysis. Fry (2010) notes that until the 1970s, white college-educated women were 30% less likely to marry than their peers, much as Becker would predict. Many of the reasons for the recent closing of this gap may not widely apply. One reason given for the reversal of the American college gap is that specialized domestic production is now worth less than additional income for pooled consumption (Stevenson and Wolfers); in non-postindustrial societies, the reverse may still be true. Even in post-industrial societies, economic insecurity and male income stagnation may be less prevalent in more egalitarian societies than in America. Neither of these two explanations is encouraging to those looking to reverse marriages decline by directly; regardless of whether contraceptive use is contributing to the decline of marriage, any reversal will need to fix broader socioeconomic problems. However, it does help focus further academic analysis on exploring the causal mechanisms of this decline, and what more subtle interventions may be effective in reversing it. I also explored the advantages and limitations of latitudinal comparisons in analyzing marriage. The worldwide variation was key in discounting contraceptive uses impact on

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marriage, attributing it to increased education instead. Yet the broad definitions and irregular measurements of global statistics forced me to use very crude measures, such as substituting contraceptive use for contraceptive availability and Muslim prevalence instead of religiosity, even after conflating for statistics across different years. Even with these measure, missing data forced me to omit over half of all countries (as mentioned above, mainly small ones, but also including China, America, India, and Russia), together containing half of the worlds population. Future latitudinal studies would be wise to prove that their remaining samples are representative and that their indicators are relatively stable over time. A more fundamental limitation of country-level analysis is the risk of ecological fallacy. The choice of when and whether a woman marries is fundamentally her own, whereas the unit of analysis is the country in which these women live. Yet a model with individual units of analysis would run an even more serious risk of reductionism, as several of the variables also measure the culture and marriage market of the country as a whole. For example, our hypothesis presumes that the prevalence of birth control causes a society-wide sexual liberalization, which affects even non-using women. Similarly, the overall religious makeup of a country has an osmotic effect on norms in its minority communities. Among our control and baseline variables, HSSexRatio and WorkforceSexRatio not only capture individual womens choices, but overall socioeconomic gender equality. The best way to minimize both risks would probably be to use country data as additional variables in an individual-level model, but no data set of individuals is both large and comprehensive enough to do this. In its absence, risking the ecological fallacy of country modeling is the lesser of the two evils.

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While complex statistical analysis may be able mitigate some the above problems, successfully, properly capturing and disentangling societal and individual factors will ultimately depend on doing field research on women in a worldwide and diverse set of communities. Ideally, the researchers would all be female, in order to navigate gender-segregated societies; and share a religion and ethnicity with the target community, in order to make the subjects comfortable talking about their private lives. The researchers primary job would be to choose ten women, five married and five unmarried, to interview; and follow them for a period of five years. Each subject would be qualitatively interviewed every six months about her own personal life, but each interview would secondarily focus on a different aspect of society at large. The observer would also more closely follow one married and one unmarried subject, and supplement their interviews with directly observed experiences about these special subjects. In addition, the researcher would also follow and analyze the local media, and interview men and parents, where socially acceptable. Getting the subjects to feel comfortable talking about their lives would probably require befriending them, especially so for the special subjects. In addition to possibly distorting the researchers observations, this presents some ethical issues that were not present when just running regressions on pre-existing data. To obtain informed consent, the researchers would have to be clear from the outset what their motive is for befriending the subject; yet they should also be sincere, appreciative, and helpful friends. When these two considerations conflict, such as when the subject wants to talk about or needs help with her sexual partner, a researcher should generally say that she cannot help. If this would cause danger or real emotional pain to the subject, the researcher should be a proper citizen and friend and help out, even if this means she

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would have to abort her research. To provide for this eventuality, several more researchers than strictly necessary should be dispatched. If the past 35 years have taught us anything, it is that any sufficient explanation of marriage prevalence trends must be very complicated. Given that, I was not surprised that my model results were inconclusive. Yet this complexity makes my proposal for cross-country latitudinal analysis all the more important. In attempting to properly grasp this social phenomenon, we will need to attack it from every angle we can.

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References
Ainsworth, N., Beegle, K., & Nyamete, A. (1996). The impact of women's schooling on fertility and contraceptive use: A study of fourteen sub-Saharan African countries. World Bank Economic Review 10:1:85-122. Becker, G. (1981). A treatise on the family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bolick, K. (November 2011). All the single ladies. The Atlantic, p. 116-136. Brill (2009). World religion database. Data retrieved April 15, 2012, from http://www.worldreligiondatabase.org/ Engelen, T., & Puschmann, E. (2011). How unique is the Western European marriage pattern? A comparison of nuptiality in historical Europe and the contemporary Arab world. History of the Family 16:387-400. Fry, R. (2010). The reversal of the college marriage gap. Available at htp://www.pewsocialtrends.org/ 2010/10/07/the-reversal-of-the-college-marriage-gap Loh, S. (July/August 2009). Lets call the whole thing off. The Atlantic, p. 116-126. Oppenheimer, V. (1994). Women's rising employment and the future of the family in industrial societies. Population and Development Review 20:293-342. Pew Social Trends (2010). The decline of marriage and the rise of new families. Available at http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2010/11/18/the-decline-of-marriage-and-rise-of-new-families Ribar, D. (2004). What do social scientists know about the benefits of marriage? A review of Quantitative Methodologies. IZA Discussion Paper No. 998. Available at SSRNL http://ssrn.com/abstract=500887 Stevenson, B., & Wolfers, J. (2007). Marriage and divorce: Changes and their driving forces. Journal of Economic Perspectives 21:2:2752. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. (2009). World marriage data 2008. Data retrieved May 11, 2012, from http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/WMD2008/WP_WMD_2008/Data.html World Bank. (2012). World development indicators. Data retrieved May 11, 2012, from http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators

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VarName PrctFemale PrctUrban PrctOnContraceptives WorkforceSexRatio HSSexRatio PrctMuslim PrctMuslim*PrctOnCont. PrctMarried-20 PrctMarried-25 PrctMarried-30 PrctMarried-35 PrctOfOtherReligions

Description
% pop female % pop urban contracep. Use, % # women in HS, as % of such men # women working, as % of such men % Muslim of the four religions Interaction Variable % women ages 20-24 married % women ages 25-29 married % women ages 30-34 married % women ages 35-39 married % ppl none of the four religions

Expected Sign + -

Mean 50.33 53.04 47.79 92.58 65.44 31.18 47.99 72.25 84.34 89.51 2.00

SD 2.06 23.22 24.07 19.99 22.49 39.57 21.84 17.55 11.98 9.42 4.73

Min 34.6 8.8 4.1 25.5 14.3 0.00 4.0 19.0 28.4 35.6 0.00

25% Median 49.8 50.5 33.7 55.0 24.2 50.7 82.4 99.1 50.6 70.8 0.40 5.41 32.15 61.9 79.4 85.8 0.19 49.1 75.5 86.7 90.7 0.51

75% 51.2 71.2 69.9 105.0 81.2 73.08 62.4 84.3 92.8 96.25 1.73

Max 54.1 97.1 86.5 128.0 108.0 99.75 92.2 98.4 99.6 99.7 33.56

Table 1: Descriptive statistics summary table (N = 107)

PrctMar-20 PrctFemale PrctUrban PrctOnContraceptives WorkforceSexRatio HSSexRatio PrctMuslim PrctMarried-20 PrctMarried-25 PrctMarried-30 PrctMarried-35

PrctMar-25

PrctMar-30

PrctMar-35

PrctFem

PrctUrb

PrctOnCon

WkforceSR

HSSexRatio

PrctMuslim

-0.0769 -0.6467 -0.6590 0.0702 -0.5880 0.3479 ---

-0.0780 -0.5702 -0.5850 0.0398 -0.5233 0.3406 0.9333 ---

-0.0695 -0.4831 -0.5206 0.0312 -0.4948 0.3298 0.8221 0.9516 ---

-0.0773 -0.4168 -0.4856 -0.0082 -0.4917 0.3600 0.7108 0.8610 0.9678 ---

---0.0498 0.1918 0.3836 0.0153 -0.3877

--0.6807 -0.2392 0.4585 -0.1875

---0.0855 0.6833 -0.3782

---0.0731 -0.5642

---0.4282

---

Table 2: Pearson correlation matrix for the full model (N = 107)

(Excluding the interaction term)

PrctFemale

PrctUrban

PrctOnContraceptives

HSSexRatio

WorkforceSexRatio

PrctMuslim

PrctMuslim* PrctOnContraceptives

1.386

2.230

4.205

2.354

2.010

7.929

5.519

Table 3: VIF Collinearity coefficients (N = 107)

PrctMarried-20 (Intercept) PrctFemale PrctUrban PrctOnContraceptives HSSexRatio WorkforceSexRatio PrctMuslim PrctMuslim*PrctOnCont. R-squared^ adj R-squared^ F

Model A 95.723* (39.74) -0.231 (0.79) -0.363*** (0.09) -0.35*** (0.09)

Model B 128.087** (43.77) -0.4007 (0.87) -0.376*** (0.10) -0.15 (0.11) -0.33** (0.11) -0.032 (0.08)

Model C 114.538* (48.98) -0.2225 (0.90) -0.345** (0.10) -0.215 (0.13) -0.306** (0.12) 0.010 (0.10) -4.135 (11.19) 0.212 (0.20)

PrctMarried-25 (Intercept) PrctFemale PrctUrban PrctOnContraceptives HSSexRatio WorkforceSexRatio PrctMuslim PrctMuslim*PrctOnCont. R-squared^ adj R-squared^ F

Model A 110.513*** (31.90) -0.2631 (0.63) -0.258*** (0.08) -0.2046** (0.07)

Model B 139.189*** (32.43) -0.4889 (0.64) -0.278*** (0.07) -0.05 (0.08) -0.2331** (0.08) -0.03 (0.06)

Model C 121.017*** (35.56) -0.2571 (0.65) -0.247** (0.07) -0.093 (0.10) -0.2076* (0.09) 0.020 (0.07) -0.896 (8.12) 0.156 (0.15)

0.508 0.493 33.84301

0.549 0.526 21.73346

0.559 0.528 15.53089

0.398 0.38 22.55784

0.433 0.405 16.92963

0.45 0.411 12.66556

Table 4: Robust regression models (Continues onto the next page)

Parenthesis are standard errors. N = 107. * P <.05; * *P <.01; ** *P <.001 (two-tailed tests). ^ Computed from equivalent non-robust, OLS model.

PrctMarried-30 (Intercept) PrctFemale PrctUrban PrctOnContraceptives HSSexRatio WorkforceSexRatio PrctMuslim PrctMuslim*PrctOnCont. R-squared^ adj R-squared^ F

Model A 102.793*** (19.02) -0.069 (0.38) -0.129** (0.04) -0.134** (0.04)

Model B 122.563*** (20.10) -0.273 (0.40) -0.137** (0.04) -0.034 (0.05) -0.148** (0.05) -0.002 (0.04)

Model C 104.841*** (20.05) -0.073 (0.37) -0.119** (0.04) -0.048 (0.05) -0.114* (0.05) 0.043 (0.04) 2.672 (4.58) 0.059 (0.08)

PrctMarried-35 (Intercept) PrctFemale PrctUrban PrctOnContraceptives HSSexRatio WorkforceSexRatio PrctMuslim PrctMuslim*PrctOnCont. R-squared^ adj R-squared^ F

Model A 102.348*** (13.23) -0.041 (0.26) -0.082** (0.03) -0.108*** (0.03)

Model B 117.966*** (13.76) -0.210 (0.27) -0.089** (0.03) -0.032 (0.04) -0.112** (0.03) 0.001 (0.02)

Model C 101.995*** (14.28) -0.032 (0.26) -0.072** (0.03) -0.044 (0.04) -0.083** (0.04) 0.043 (0.03) 2.428 (3.26) 0.051 (0.06)

0.302 0.282 20.87786

0.344 0.311 14.44382

0.358 0.313 13.15757

0.25 0.228 22.4822

0.306 0.272 16.47288

0.328 0.28 14.24037

Table 4 (continued)

Charts 1-2: Bivariate plot between contraceptive use and marriage prevalence (N = 107)

Charts 3-4: Bivariate Plot between Muslim prevalence and marriage prevalence (N = 107)

Chart 5: Bivariate plot between Muslim prevalence and contraceptive use (N = 107)