From one birth cohort to the next: changes in marriage timing of Iranian women

Fatemeh Torabi, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)

Between 1986 and 1996, the mean age at marriage of Iranian women increased by 2.5 years. This sharp increase happened during a period of major socio-economic changes with a considerable improvement in access to education, a gradual process of urbanisation, a period of war, followed with a period of economic recovery. This paper analyses the marriage timing of two birth cohorts of women experiencing their pre-marriage years during the two periods of socio-economic change (1980s and 1990s). We account for spatial and temporal changes in the socio-economic context of transition to first marriage by applying a discrete time hazard model to the 2000 Iran Demographic and Health Survey and a range of time-varying district level contextual variables derived from two rounds of censuses. The marriage postponement of the younger birth cohort has been partly due to the ideational and behavioural changes resulted from access to education and partly due to the restrictions of the marriage market