Educational Assortative Mating and Higher-Order Births in Sub-Saharan Africa

• In Event: 40861 - Section on Sociology of Population Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Fertility and Social Change

Abstract

With the educational expansion in the past several decades, the gender gap in education attainment in sub-Saharan African (SSA) has been closing. As a result, compositions of educational assortative mating have shifted in the recent marriage cohorts. Changing patterns of birth spacing for higher-order births accompany these shifting patterns of educational assortative mating. I use Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data from Uganda to explore the relationships between educational differences between married couples and the birth spacing of their higher-order births after the third birth. Preliminary results show that marriage pairs in which the husband does not have the educational advantage have longer birth spacings, but this difference is mostly driven by the differences in lower order birth intervals. Among all educational assortative mating groups, hypogamous couples (H

Author

• Iris Huimeng Zhao, University of Wisconsin-Madison