Marriage Prevalence among Young-Adults in India: Social, Time and Regional Trends

Sonia Chager, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Joan Garcia Roman, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Antonio López Gay, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Albert Esteve, Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics (CED)

We use labour force microdata to study the relationship between societal changes and marriage prevalence among young-adults in India over the last two decades. Societal predictors considered include phenomena such as educational expansion, women’s economic activity and urbanization. Individual predictors include socio-economic characteristics and also religion. Analysis will be based on Labour force survey microdata for India (1983, 1987, 1993 and 1999) made available by the Integrated Public Use of Microdata Series international project (IPUMSi), with complementary use of the Demographic Health Surveys (1992-93, 1998-99 and 2005-06). We conduct a multilevel analysis to investigate demographic trends at two levels of disaggregation: regional and individual. Even though it is still the case that family and parental decisions strongly influence marriage decisions, our preliminary results show that marriage postponement for women is nearly universal. Educational attainment proves to be an important factor in these shifts.