Couples' Fertility Preferences in Kenya
Abstract
The objective of this study was to find out the extent of similarities and differences
among couple fertility preferences and also to examine the effect of demographic,
socio-economic and socio-cultural factors on these preferences. Very few studies
have given couple studies the due attention; hence this was a slight deviation from the
very common female studies.
The study found out that as much as nearly half of the couples agreed on the desire for
addition children and ideal family size, there seems to be an enormous amount of
disagreement statistically. This was done using the Cohen kappa statistic. The level of
agreement for desire for more children was only 37% while that for ideal family size
was 22%. In all the situations a superior level of agreement was noted among couples
who have similar characteristics such as the same age, the same level of education or
the same duration of marriage.
Results of multivariate analysis show that demographic, socio-economic and sociocultural
factors fail to account for significant explanations of the variations in couple
fertility preference. This may have been necessitated by the large amount of
disagreement noted among the couples.
Citation
Masters thesis University of Nairobi (2002)Publisher
University of Nairobi Department of Arts
Description
Degree of Master of Arts in Population Studies