Application of Classification Tree Approach to Analysis Youth Marriage Age Gap

Abstract

Background: During the last decades, the average gap between attitudinal and behavioral youths’ marriage age has increased due to the changes of Iranian normative system in society and family patterns. This paper devoted to study this increment. Methods: Classification and Regression Trees (CART) algorithm are applied to model marriage age gap (MAG) of 12741 youths selected by multi-stage cluster sampling method from 31 provinces in Iran. Results: Classification accuracies of fitted CART for females’ and males’MAG were equal to 0.62 and 0.60, respectively. The most influential variables on females' and males'MAG were educational level and number of siblings, respectively. Females with "university education", "diploma and less education with 5 and more siblings", and “employed diploma and less education with 3 or 4 siblings" married later than their desired time. Males with "3 and more siblings", "employed with 2 and less siblings and 3 and more ideal number of children", "employed university educated with 2 and less siblings and 1 or 2 ideal number of children", and " employed with 2 and less siblings and 1 or 2 ideal number of children with diploma and less education and negative opinion towards childbearing" also married later than their desired time. Conclusion: If the inevitable experience of modernity doesn’t combined with the convenient policy and the economic and socio-cultural conditions of the community don’t change, negative consequences of such developments would be more than its positive achievements on different social issues specially and more importantly youths marriage age.

Keywords

• Marriage Age
• Youth
• Decision Trees
• Iran