Union Formation among Women in the Philippines: Analysis Using Pseudo Cohorts

The trend in union formation among women has changed in the Philippines in the last decade. Based on the series of national demographic surveys, the percentage of Filipino women in a formal marriage generally declined (53 percent in 1998 to 51 percent in 2008). During the same period, the percentage of women who entered into a cohabiting union almost doubled from six percent to 11 percent. These trends are no different from those found using the census data (see Kabamalan, 2006).

But while such levels of change can be analyzed using cross-sectional data repeatedly, one cannot find out how the marital behaviour for an individual changed over time because there are different people in the sample for the different years. This paper attempts to fill this gap by using pseudo cohorts which enables for the tracking of the average experiences of people born in the same year. Thus, trends over time, trends by age and their interaction can be examined.

Following the procedures described by (Uren, 2006) for the General Household Survey Pseudo Cohort Dataset, the 1998, 2003 and 2008 National Demographic and Health Surveys for the Philippines was transformed into one dataset containing over 41,000 individual records from the birth cohorts of 1948 to 1993.