An empirical exploration of female child marriage determinants in Indonesia

Following international definitions, we also estimated marriage before the age of 15, however due to low prevalence (2.7%), we were not able to estimate the full model with regional fixed effects among the full sample. However, the contribution of covariates among the key structural determinants in models excluding regional fixed effects was very similar in terms of magnitude and significance of coefficients using this definition of child marriage as compared to the model presented in the manuscript.

Attitudes are similar but distinct from measures of ‘social norms’, defined as socially ascribed behavioral rules that are shared by individuals in a given society or group and which are followed because they are considered appropriate and normal behavior [30]. Some research uses personal attitudes interchangeably with a similar concept of personal normative beliefs, however for conceptual clarity, we interpret our measure as an attitude only [40].

In November 2012, North Kalimantan split from East Kalimantan becoming Indonesia’s 34th province.

The ARH data include four outliers; these respondents report their preferred marital age to be higher than 35 years (however mean preferred age remains similar at 25.5 years when we exclude these outliers). Similarly, when aforementioned four outliers are excluded from the multivariate analysis, the magnitude of the coefficients remains similar and the statistical significance of the results remains unchanged.

Although the indicator we operationalize is logged, we further investigate whether or not the significant relationship could be driven by the skewed distribution whereby there are some relatively richer females with a large number of siblings driving this relationship. Although significance level is diminished and no longer significant in marriage or cohabitation before 18 years and before 16 years, there is still a significant relationship with ever being married or cohabiting when we utilize dummy variables for higher than mean number of siblings (i.e. above four or five siblings). It could be that a better measure to operationalize would be number of female (instead of total) siblings, however as mentioned, overall this relationship warrants further investigation.