Work, living arrangements, marriage and childbearing among adolescents and young women: What do we know from household-based surveys and is it correct?

This study discusses reasons why household-based surveys might under-represent young unmarried and childless women and therefore not capture correctly the life experiences of young women. We examine the differences in marital status data between household-based surveys and censuses in several Asian countries that have experienced increased labor force participation among young women (Bangladesh, Cambodia, Lao PDR and Mongolia). To determine the extent of over-estimation of fertility levels, we adjust age-specific fertility rates on the basis of marital status distribution in censuses. The implications for interpretations of the fertility trends are far-reaching. In Bangladesh, while differences between reported and adjusted values were small for the 1992-93 DHS, the 2007 DHS reported an adolescent fertility (ABR) of 126 and was adjusted to 77 births per 1000 women aged 15-19. When analyzing fertility trends only from DHS, the country achieved in two decades a relatively small deduction adolescent childbearing. Yet the story may, in fact, be different: the postponement of childbearing —concurrent with the postponement in marriage as seen in the census data—resulted in a decline of ABR to half the level from the early 1990s and played a key role in the rapid fertility decline in Bangladesh.